Welcome to UFO Week!

 

    Last week, the addition of new shelves in my wholesale department required moving, sorting and finding another home for several items. (The "wholesale department" is the closet where I store the patterns that I sell to quilt shops, who eventually sell those patterns to you.)  When I move one thing in my sewing area it sets off an avalanche of other moves.  The result was the unearthing of several more projects that were added to my UFO pile.  I decided that something had to be done and the time is now.  I have officially deemed this week as UFO Week.

    I began sifting through the pile, sorting the tops that need to be quilted from those that need borders and the quilted pieces that only need bindings.   I ended up with another pile that needs something... I'm not sure what it is that they need, but something has prevented me from thinking that the top is finished. That something is the reason the project landed in the UFO pile.

    I started to wonder.  What is the difference between a UFO and WIP?  Quilters like to use cute terms and abbreviations to label their work.  WIP stands for Work In Progress.  Aren't all unfinished projects works in progress?  Admittedly some progress is slow... very slow, but when do you decide there will be no more progress?  Why is it that some unfinished projects have hope as a WIP and others are banished to the corner or back of the closet as a UFO?  WIP projects are like those leftovers that you wrap and place in the frig with good intensions of using them for something tasty.  Then they get moved to the back, behind the things you use daily.  The next thing you know they are a UFO weeks old and headed for the trash.  What happened to the potential they had?  What keeps a WIP from being banished to the bottom of the UFO bin?

    With my Handi Quilter cleared of the latest project and not yet piled with stacks of deadline projects, I have decided to dedicate at least a part of each day toward making a dent in that UFO pile.  The tops that are simply waiting to be quilted is the easiest place to start.  

UFO Week, Project #1:

Project: Easy Street Quilt

Requires: To be quilted and bound.

The reason it is a UFO: This one is more of a WIP.  It is not quite 2 years old.  It is the sample featured on my Easy Street pattern that features the Straight Out Of Line ruler by Karla Alexander for Creative Grids.  Once the project photo is taken, I don't need to finish the project unless I want to show it off.  I will be vending at the quilt show in Jacksonville, Florida in September, so now is the perfect time to finish this project.      The REAL reason it is a UFO is that after assembling the blocks and taking the photo I noticed that the random arrangement of the blocks, wasn't as random as I originally thought.  Two blocks featuring the monkey print are facing the same way in the top row.  I set the quilt top aside, intending to take one of those blocks out and rotate it 90 degrees and put it back in before quilting the quilt.  Months later, those two blocks don't bother me anymore.  This is a baby quilt.  Will the baby that uses this quilt care about those monkeys that face the same way?  I doubt it.  Will that child not get into Harvard because their baby quilt had a block that may have looked better facing a different direction.  I think not.  I know for a fact that no baby will every enjoy using this quilt if it stays in my UFO pile.  Done is better than perfect.

Progress:  I have lots and lots of fabric in my sewing room so finding a backing for this project was easy.  It is not the perfect shade of green, but in my effort to save the life of a UFO, a fun backing is better than none.  I loaded it onto my Handy Quilter Amara.

    Next, I had to choose a thread color and quilting pattern.  I normally quilt with 50 wt. embroidery thread for one single reason.  I own a TON of it.  I have almost every color imaginable, so why not use it?  For this project I had the skimpy spool of the perfect color or the much larger spool of the "ok color".  I decided to play it safe and go with the ok color!  Running out of thread would certainly dampen my enthusiasm for finishing this project.

    My longarm is computerized so quilting is as simple as selecting the design you want and telling the machine the size of your quilt.  The computer makes the magic happen.  For this project I chose a curved design that looks like a monkey wrench to me.  There are monkeys on the fabric, so it seemed like a good choice.  While the Amara was doing its thing, I searched out a length of the border fabric that was cut from the edge of another quilt long ago.  It was more than enough to make the binding for this project.  (Side note: That border and binding fabric are a texture print that I designed many years ago for Timeless Treasures Fabrics.  I created the texture by doing a layered Crayola rubbing on the front of my refrigerator!)

    When the quilting machine was finished stitching the allover design, I trimmed and then stitched the binding in place.  I like to finish bindings by hand stitching the binding on the back of the quilt, but this quilt got the stitch in the ditch by machine finish.  FINISHED - that feels good!

Day one of UFO week was very productive!

Why don't you join me and celebrate UFO Week by finishing up a few of your own UFO's?