Meandering Around My Studio

I was watching one of the design shows yesterday afternoon on HGTV. The designer was redoing the living room of a woman who quilts, knits and does bead work. At one point during the show when they were looking through the woman's UFOs the designer said, "You should never have more than 3 projects to be work on at one time. Any more than 3 projects and you will feel bogged down." I wanted to jump through the TV screen and ask the designer if she has spent any amount of with quilters! Obviously not. I know many quilters have many, many more than 3 projects in their UFO pile, and yes, sometimes we do feel overwhelmed by the amount of UFOs we have, but I can't imagine only having 3 projects to work on at any one time. I like the freedom that comes with having many UFOs to choose from on any given day.

Take yesterday afternoon and this morning for example. Yesterday DH left at 2 PM to play poker so I had time for myself. I took a short nap and when I woke up I wandered into my studio. I started to straighten up so it was clean when we leave on vacation later this week. I put a few items away, but while going through one of my baskets I decided to make some 1.5 inch HSTs for a Challenge I'm working on. So I took out my Triangles on a Roll, cut some fabric squares and proceeded to make 128 1.5 inch HSTs while listening to Jesus Christ Superstar. I got them sewed, cut apart and the paper torn off. I also pressed about 32 of them.

I thought I was done in the room for the day and spent some time catching up on email, blogs and internet surfing. I've had this entry by Karen at Sew Primitive marked since she posted it earlier this month. I finally got tired of seeing the post so I closed up the computer, went back into my sewing room and pulled out my Siggie blocks from our Blogger Siggie Swap earlier this year. In 45 minutes I had the blocks sewn together and now the top is ready to finish. If you participated in the swap, can you find your block?



This morning I entered my studio with the same intent to straighten it up. While I'm on vacation and shopping I want to collect some purple, lavender and gray fabrics for a quilt for my MIL. I pulled the few fabrics I have so far and then remembered I have a BOM quilt I started for her 2 years ago packed away and unfinished. I started digging through my closet and found the container with the fabric and some of the blocks in it. I sorted out what was done and realized that with sewing borders on one block I would have four blocks done and I could make a table topper or baby quilt from them. So I did it. Not sure what to do for border, but someday I'll get around to it.

Since I was digging through my UFO containers I kept at it. I found the half-made blocks for a Snail's Trail quilt. This was a mystery quilt from 2 years that I got bogged down on because my block halves weren't matching up well. I put the quilt away and had forgotten I even had it. I started pinning the halves together and ended up with 20 decent blocks. So I sewed those blocks together and now I have another top ready for a border. But I am really stumped on how to proceed with the top. I'm not thrilled with how much white is on the quilt, but I'm sure I will take the quilt to my long armer and she will be able to fill in the white nicely with quilting. But what about the borders? Any suggestions for the borders? Help me please! This quilt would be a great gift for SIL and DIL.

Now I am done playing in my studio for the day and won't be back in there for three weeks. So tell me, if I had disposed of these 3 UFOs because I have more than 3 projects what would I have done this weekend?