Working Ahead

One of the stranger things about the 100 Quilt Project is just how far ahead I am.

When I started, I expected the project to feel like a race. One hundred quilt patterns is a lot of quilts, a lot of sewing, a lot of writing, and a lot of moving parts. I assumed I'd always be looking nervously at the next deadline.

Now, somewhere along the way, I seem to have become the sort of person who can make a quilt in 2026 and know that nobody else will see it until 2028.

I'm still not entirely sure how that happened.

Part of it is consistency. I've always been fairly good at understanding that large projects get done one step at a time. If I know where I want to be five years from now, then I know I need to be doing something about it today.

That doesn't mean every day looks the same.

Sometimes I want to sew. Sometimes I want to design. Sometimes I wake up with a quilt idea rattling around in my head and head straight for the computer. Other days, I work on diagrams, instructions, or the less glamorous parts of running a quilt pattern business simply because they need doing.

One thing I learned fairly early in the project is that I dislike being behind much more than I dislike doing digital work.

The sewing is easy to prioritize because it's fun. The pattern writing, diagrams, photography, social media scheduling, website updates, and all the other pieces that happen after a quilt is finished require a little more intention. Falling behind creates a hole, and climbing back out of that hole is much less enjoyable than steadily keeping up.

The photos in this post are a good example of what most of the project actually looks like. Scraps. Chain piecing. Fabric stacks. Thread burying. Units waiting to become blocks. Blocks waiting to become quilts. A quilt waiting for binding. None of it is particularly dramatic, but that's where most of the work happens.

Another thing I've discovered is that making a quilt and releasing a quilt are two very different things.

When I finish a design that I really love, my first instinct is to share it immediately. Instead, it gets photographed, written, edited, scheduled, and placed into a release calendar. Then I move on to the next project while that quilt waits its turn.

Sometimes that wait is surprisingly long.

There are quilts I've finished that won't be released for many months. Some won't appear until 2028. That's probably been one of the hardest adjustments of the entire project. I spend months immersed in a design, finally reach the point where everything works, and then quietly file it away for a future version of me to talk about.

The upside is that working ahead creates a kind of breathing room. The further ahead I get, the more freedom I have to enjoy the work itself instead of worrying about deadlines.

At this point, the completed content stretches well into 2028. That wasn't the result of a single burst of productivity or a particularly ambitious weekend. It happened the same way quilts get made: one piece at a time.

Looking back (from the middle of this project), it came from hundreds of small decisions made over time. Sometimes that meant spending hours in the studio. Sometimes it meant spending fifteen minutes updating a spreadsheet or fixing a pattern file. Sometimes it meant doing work that nobody will ever notice because it happens behind the scenes.

None of those steps feels particularly significant in the moment. But taken together, they add up.

Maybe that's what consistency looks like for me. Not doing the same thing every day, and certainly not feeling motivated every day. Just repeatedly making choices that move the project forward, even if the step is small.

Looking through these photos, that's what I see. Not individual quilts, but the accumulation of a lot of small decisions over time.