Reality Check - Dealing with UFOs in 2022

I will admit, my method of dealing with my UFOs in the last few years has been to ignore them.

Yes, completely ignore them.

I knew that if I got distracted by them - well, how would I get those other quilts done that I want to get finished?

Things like my UP Blues, this Up Greens series, and even more of the 2” series - I have several quilts that are finished or tops that need to be quilted from that series. If I keep getting distracted, I will not be able to get done what I MOST want to get done.

But it hit me quite recently that the UFOs are taking up a lot of space. I could use that much more profitably than how I am.

Let me show you.

Here is the cabinet that houses the bags of these projects. I really don’t want to take them all out and count and list them. I think I’ll try another tactic. I think I will just open the door, take out 1, 2 or 3 baggies and decide several things -

Everything in this cabinet is already bagged up - and meant to be kept together.

  1. Do I want to finish this?

  2. If I want to finish it - do I want it to be full size or can I make a small “thing” and be done?

  3. If I don’t want it - where/how do I get rid of the pieces?

    There are several options here - if it is quite old and I don’t want to think about it, I can toss it in the burn pile - not something I usually do, by the way. I can throw the pieces into my scraps - and consider that taken care of. I can give it to someone else. Our local freecycle group is active and there are many sewists there - and Ewa is always ready to take fabric.

  4. If I want to finish it - what kind of plan do I want to make? - what do I need to do to finish this at least to a ‘top’ level? Then I will make a plan and move forward with this. (Maybe dealing with that room in the basement and that STUFF has given me the courage to tackle these.)

I have come to this point because while I’ve not really thought about these in the last few years, I did think about them in January. I saw a couple of videos about UFOs for 2022 (or possibly I just saw the titles but didn’t actually watch them! :))

That really didn’t do it for me - not really, but I did get me to thinking about using that storage space for active projects and not just sticking old things in there that I may have gotten stuck on or lost interest in.

Maybe I am ready to tackle some of these things.

Let me digress and show you a cross stitch project.

Naturally if I had started with small projects, and gotten proficient FIRST, I could have handled this one. But no, that’s not generally how I work. I wanted to “go big”!

This was my FIRST project I decided to tackle. Or maybe it was one of my first.

Anyway…I learned about counted cross stitch in college - and I liked the idea of it because I didn’t like the blue ink you could see little bits of after you did the stitching on traditional “stamped” cross stitch like I had grown up doing.

I decided to try one and began to work on this one. It was part 1 of a 4 part Norman Rockwell pattern series.

I got stuck. I had gotten to a place where I had made some mistakes on the flowers in the girl’s hands.

So I put it away for a few years. I really did like it, however, and eventually, after a few years, I got it back out and decided to “work on it”. We were travelling the USA on freeways and I had a lot of driving time to work on it. At that point, I had to deal with the area in the flowers where I had made the mistake. However, after having done several projects in the intervening years, I realized that I could easily fix my “mistakes” with the flowers by adapting and moving forward and no one would know the difference - after all, they were FLOWERS, not a geometric design! I didn’t actually have to unpick anything.

To make a long story short, I did. The experience I had gained in the years between when I stopped working on the project and when I picked it up again gave me the confidence and knowledge I needed to know how to fix the problem and move on.

We got it framed and eventually brought it to Poland with us where it hangs in our bedroom. I have never done the other 3 in the series. :(

I am hoping that some of these baggies of fabrics will work the same. Whatever caused me not to know what to do or to lose interest - I’m hoping I will be better able to “figure it out” and deal with it. I’m not one at all to try to make myself feel guilty with this thing called “quilting” - so you will never hear me cast aspersions on anyone for having unfinished projects. I do not call it a character flaw or wasted money or anything like that - simply because I don’t believe that about unfinished projects.

I’ve dealt with that idea on a few other blogs.

Anyway - that’s my plan.

I’ll try to keep you posted on how this is going this year as the year progresses. I dare not promise too much - after all last year was so strange for me - it showed me not to make big promises and assume anything. But I’ll try.

The first four ‘things’ I pulled out are these:

So…I will tackle these first ones first. The cabinet you saw with the doors open is AFTER these four came tumbling out - so for me to say these are things I ‘pulled out’ is a slight overstatement.

I need to make decisions about them as listed above and move forward. I’m wanting to use the space in the cabinet for active projects!

Thanks so much for reading this far and for coming along on this quilting (and life) journey with me!

Becky Petersen11 Comments