Finishing Your Quilt Is A Good Thing

UFOs, FFOs, WIPs, WTH?

I’ve spent the last month upcycling a wedding dress from 1974 into a dress that the bride would want to wear.  It was quite a challenge, but among other things, I learned how to join lace using the applique method.   I was pretty much immersed in satin and lace, thinking about nothing else.

The dress went home to a very happy bride and I could breathe again.  There was a kind of let down when all was said and done but I woke up the next morning feeling free with a sudden urge to turn my UFO’s (unfinished objects) into FFO”s (finally finished objects).

Yesterday afternoon was a marathon of straight line quilting.  There were 106 lines, 63 inches long.  I bought Basic Mixologie layer cakes by Moda Fabrics from Sewcial Studio to make the top in beginning of the year.  I used a double slice pattern to join the squares together.  The back was finished a few months later.  Today I made the bias binding and will start hand sewing tonight.  It’s a wedding present for my nephew who’s getting married next month.

Double Slice Layer Cake Quilt

Meanwhile, this afternoon there’s another UFO that’s probably been waiting longer to be finished.  When Sewcial Studio closed its brick and mortar store, they were selling quilt top samples.  I think I had the idea that I would give it to my other nephew for a wedding present.  That wedding has come and gone.  I did some scrap busting and made another quilt that I thought more suited the happy couple.

Irish Chain Mini Quilt

Compared to other quilters I’ve seen or read about, I’m pretty light in the UFO department; quilt-wise that is.  My stash is more WIP (work in progress).  Fabric I bought to make specific quilts with good ideas on how to finish them, have now turned into drawers filled with “what was I going to do with that?”  In some ways, that’s good.  My skill level keeps increasing so instead of doing all disappearing nine patch quilts, I can branch out to paper piecing or some other intricate design.  Maybe practice my free motion quilting.  Modern Athens Quilts challenges me every month to use some technique I haven’t tried yet.  The great thing about that is we do it on a small scale so if I don’t like it, there’s not a whole quilt gone down the tubes.  Another benefit is that it gets my ideas out on fabric and they’re not running around in my head.

There are endless reasons to not finish a quilt.  I have great ideas and then when I start putting them to use that perfect piece of fabric, they’re not quite what I expected.  Some procrastination comes into play.  Plus, there is that thing called life.  “Grammo, can you pick me up from school?”  “What do I make for dinner?”  That’s how many loads of laundry yet to wash and dry?  Plus, there are people who need just a hem; or I have this idea for a dress and they need it by yesterday.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining.  Isn’t having so much beautiful fabric waiting for you a good thing?  I’m not even going to begin counting up the pieces of leather and purse frames, etc. I have waiting for me.  That’s probably another blog.