Dear Diary 2006 is a journal quilt of sorts. That is to say, I planned to make a 3″ block every single day relating to some event of the day. At the end of the year I would have an epic quilt along the lines of Dear Jane.

Instead of 365 I ended up with 60. Designing, pulling fabric and making an entirely new block each and every day proved to be a bit more than I could handle. Even though many are traditional blocks and a few came from books and magazines, there was still the work of choosing a symbolic block and redrafting it because not very many people design 3″ blocks.

For 2009 I vowed to complete some of my UFOs and these blocks were even mostly sewn into rows already so it was an easy decision to tackle Dear Diary rather than some of my less complete projects. I’m really glad I did, because I love the way it turned out even though I only got through about 16% of the year’s blocks. I can still remember what most of the day-blocks I did finish represent. Here’s a sampling:

Shoe Shopping: Annika and I were shopping for shoes and these beaded silk shoes caught her eye. Since they were a bit impractical for kindergarten, we settled on an appliquéd quilt block to remember the shoes by.

Road to California: I chose this traditional block for the day I attended the Road to California quilt show in Ontario. The orange and green fabrics represent oranges in the citrus trees.

Taking Down the Tree: This represents the day we took down and put away the Christmas tree and ornaments. I’m pretty sure it was still January.

Snow Day: Yes it actually snowed right here in sunny Southern California. The kids (and grown-ups too) had a grand snow day, although it only lasted until about 11:00 am, when the sun came out and melted it all.

Ladybug Hunt: Annika and her friends had a wonderful time at the park one fine spring day when the grass was a veritable garden, not of flowers but of ladybugs.

Nancy Halpern wrote a great article, Quilting Day by Day, about this daily kind of journal quilt in the May 1997 issue of Threads magazine. In it she told the story of her daily quilt journal that she made in 1990.

Nancy had the foresight to set down some rules before she began. One of those rules was to finish the block by the end of the day even if it’s just to cut a single piece of fabric to represent that day. And she wrote her daily records in an actual journal, not whatever scrap of paper happened to be sitting next to her sewing machine that day.

If I had read this article and Nancy’s rules before I started, Dear Diary 2006 would probably have been a much larger quilt. But there’s always 2010 … or maybe simply summer vacation 2009 or Labor Day weekend for a trial run.