Finishing
At the end of 2019, American Patchwork and Quilting put out the 2020 UFO Challenge:
download the 2020 Challenge Chart
Fill in the 12 projects to finish in 2020
Each month APQ will draw a number, that will correspond with that project list
finish that project (or at least move it forward)
By the end of the year you have 12 finished projects! or at least will have moved those projects along.
Brilliant!
While I knew I had lots of unfinished projects, I didn't know exactly what I had left or left to do. So I audited all my fabric/projects/everything.
I was new again to quilting. I hadn't don't any since circa 2000. Everything got dug out; all the boxes and bags. And I looked at everything, making piles, jotting down notes, associating patterns and templates as they were discovered. Surveying my piles I saw I had way more than 12 unfinished projects.
There were some obvious contenders:
Storm at sea quilt (dyed fabrics)
Meadowland quilt
Storm at sea quilt (suede fabric)
Country baskets quilt
But there were also random piles of blocks:
round-robin centre
churn-dash blocks
lots and lots of log cabins (little and bigger)
pieced flowers sew-along
As I surveyed the piles on my living room floor, I felt overwhelmed. could I even be bothered finishing these quilts, let alone sewing these blocks (and making up the missing blocks) into quilts? Did I need that many quilts I didn't have many feelings about?
Then it struck me: if I sewed all the loose blocks together into ONE quilt, that would be several birds taken care of with one stone. I started laying out the blocks, trying to organise them in a way that was halfway decent. And by joves, they kinda looked okay, you know?
But it was big. Really big. I'd already finished pulling together the Country baskets blocks and sent them to a long arm quilter in Christchurch. It was the first time I'd ever availed myself of the services of a quilter and was really happy with the results. So I thought I'd do the same with this quilt. I contacted one of the long-armers on my Instagram feed. She urged me to read her blogpost on borders and squaring up quilts so I did that, making the quilt even bigger, but by all assessments "squarer".
And then I did what I always do: I sat on that quilt top for another year. ANOTHER YEAR!!
Part two coming soon…
Photo by Adam Winger on Unsplash