Many years later...

Where exactly is the line between naming a quilt that is not finished (yet) a WIP or a UFO? This is a philosophical question of utmost importance, I think. Certainly, when you know you won’t finish it because you just don’t like what you have done, then it could be considered a UFO – but wouldn’t it be more honest to call it a Never-to-be-finished something, or an error?

How many projects do we all have in our boxes, drawers, bags that we don’t even exactly remember anymore but still sort of assume we will finish some day? For a while now I have been pulling bits and pieces from my boxes which are more or less finished fragments, leftovers and cut-offs that are neither enough to make something from (except for little bags and stuff, which is definitely not my thing) nor interesting enough to pursue as a work that might be finished eventually. The idea is that perhaps I could just throw them together and make a very wild picknick blanket. But I might also send them to a group of women who are making cushions for cancer patients and who have asked my for scraps and leftovers. 

But those pieces that one still wants to finish… I have been working on a top for years which was inspired by my absolute favorite quilt I ever saw in an exhibition in Raleigh, NC that used the Underground Railroad/Jacob’s Ladder pattern. (See a picture of the flyer here. That's the only picture I have of that quilt.) Of course, I would have wished to make a top that was as striking as my favorite, but as that one lived through the scarceness of fabrics used, I know nothing I make will ever be as good.

So for my top I  could choose colors, a layout, use my hand-dyed fabrics, and a piece of a blue multi-colored fabric dyed by Heide Stoll-Weber. It was meticulously planned, certainly an activity that is not my usual way of preparing or sewing. 

I numbered the blocks, I precut the pieces, I even marked and hand-cut them with plastic templates, no rotary cutting. And I spent a long time piecing the individual blocks, with long intermissions, periods of failing motivation, other things that needed doing. 

(at the end, of course, I was surprised by how my prechosen fabrics looked together, but luckily it was not an unpleasant surprise.)

Finally, it was finished – and I realized that several blocks had faults in the set up of the inner four-square-arrangements. 

I spent at least a year agonizing over whether I should take those sections apart and fix that. I finally did… But in a manner that made sure thatnot all the inner square arrangments had the same orientation, allowing for more variability. Then  I realized I wanted the pattern to extend out into a border and spent probably another six months before getting around to that step. 

Quilting on the longarm was easy after that – finished well before Christmas last year, and I let myself be inspired by a pantograph I had bought at the over-motivated days of my longarm acquisition, before I realised that pantographs are simply not my thing. So I freearmed a similar pattern.

Today I finally finished putting on the binding...

Nothing, compared to the inspiration, but not at all bad for a finally finished project of many years that is simply a quilt to be a quilt to snuggle up under.

Not a WIP anymore. Whew. So … what WIP is next?