UFOs and Insight

 It's very early on Sunday morning, three a.m., a time most people would consider to be the middle of the night. We insomniacs know better. 

I'm having a cup of decaf coffee and I just finished eating a bowl of very simple, homemade vegetable soup to which I added some TVP and a squeeze from a tube of concentrated tomato paste and a few shakes of Sweet Baby Ray hot sauce. That's my pre-breakfast. In a few more hours, I'll have real breakfast.

Of course I'm cruising around online. What did we used to do in the middle of the night when we couldn't sleep and there wasn't an internet to feed our insomniac brains? We read. I read anyway. Or I lay in bed thinking about how I wasn't sleeping. But mostly I read. Last night instead of reading I sewed, finishing up a work in progress, the quilt I mentioned in my last blog entry. (Aw, shit. I just remembered that the bulb on my sewing machine burned out so I need to get online and order a new one.)

I sat down earlier tonight and wrote out the half-finished or sometimes barely started sewing projects (quilts, mainly) that I have in the works. Quilters call them UFOs (Un-Finished Objects). Here is my list:

1. A dark, string-pieced quilt-as-you-go quilt that needs to be sashed together and bound. It's currently rolled up in a large project bag under my sewing table.

2. A red and white quilt, improvisational in style, that I started after reading Sherri Lynn Wood's book The Improv Handbook for Modern Quilters. I started it, sadly realized that not prewashing my red fabric was likely going to result in my having a red and pink quilt--that, enough to discourage me--and then on top of that, I ran out of the red and white fabrics I was using and when I went to purchase more, I realized that I had not kept track of which red and which white I had used. There are many, many shades of each one, by the way, and yes, your eye can pick up on the differences when they're side by side. So I put it in a plastic project box and there it sits. (It is likely to be the next thing I work on.)

3. An English paper-pieced hexagon quilt that I started last year. It is sitting in pieces in a project bag because all the hand-sewing triggered my tendonitis. I thought I would try machine piecing it, so I bought some invisible thread, but I have yet to take the thread out of the package. Paper-piecing is very labor intensive, whether done my machine or (especially) by hand.

4. An uber-scrappy quilt made from blocks sewn together from a muslin base, water-soluble stabilizer, and the kinds of scraps that rightfully should go in the garbage, like, fabric trimmings that are too small to be sewn, tangles of thread, bits of selvedge, and so on. I made four large blocks (of what I think will eventually be 16 blocks total for a quilt). Then I ran out of muslin so I stopped. I bought more muslin recently (and I have bags and bags of scraps to use), but it needs to be ironed and cut up before I can start again. (Seems like such a small hurdle when I write it, but--ugh--ironing, and once I'm past that, I have to commit to making the blocks, itself a production.)

5. A crumb slab quilt that is in some form in my box of crumbs. The Brain is still trying to decide if continuing this is a thing, so it is almost a proto-UFO and not a proper UFO.

In case you don't know, a completed but unquilted quilt top is sometimes called a "flimsy." I have a few of these:

6. Flimsy #1 is a house/field/tree/fox quilt that needs borders put onto it. I hate putting borders on, so I stopped at that point, folded it up and put it away.

7. Flimsy #2 is made of improv house blocks with some embroidery on the top. I made it in 2016 and, thinking of how to expand it (borders? borders with cornerstones?) with no clear way forward was enough to get me to stop working on it. (At the time I made it, I had not quilted anything or even made a quilt-sized quilt. I had just purchased my sewing machine and a bit of fabric and this flimsy is made of a small pack of 5-inch squares of 30s reproduction fabrics that I would never buy now.) I pulled this flimsy out recently to have a look at it and I don't think that it even needs to be expanded, so my plan is to quilt it and face it (instead of binding it) and turn it into a wall hanging. I do have a soft spot for this little thing.

8. Flimsy #3, the Forgettable Flimsy. This is made of improv log-cabin blocks. It's very pedestrian and I'm thinking of adding big stitch quilting to it to try to jazz it up. That means a lot of work on an already uninspiring quilt top, so...maybe of all the quilt tops, this is the one to shift from unfinished to abandoned. (I say that knowing that if I put in the work, it would probably end up being one of my favorites.) (I also say that knowing that even big stitch quilting is hard on my hands and exacerbates my tendonitis, leaving me nursing my offended thumbs for days to weeks after.)

9. Flimsy #4, the Ojo flimsy from 2016. This is also improv pieced (most of my things are, to be honest), multi-colored solid fabrics made into Ojos de Dios, like those I made with yarns and sticks when I was a child.  As it stands, it's about wall hanging sized. But I stopped working on it: This is where black fabric gets you, as I pieced one block using a different black fabric than the other three and didn't notice until I had sewn them together and it is very clearly a different shade of black. So now what? Let it go? Chop it up? Quilt it and hang it anyway? Or leave it folded in my basket of flimsies?

So that's it, my list of UFOs in play.  If you count all the quilted things I've made, from full-on quilts to wall-hangings, I've completed 12 quilts in about three years (though I've had my sewing machine for four years). Is that a lot?

As I work, I sometimes remind myself of one of the quilters I watch online, Jennie Doan from Missouri Star Quilt Company, whose motto is "Finished is Better than Perfect." Sometimes that's enough. Sometimes, too, I think: This is not the quilt that's going to win blue ribbons and be displayed with your name and artist's statement next to it at all the international quilt shows; this is the quilt, for example, that teaches you that you can even complete a quilt--or how to change the foot on your sewing machine so that you can use your free motion foot--or how to apply sashings--or that you don't have the patience to complete an entire paper-pieced project--or that you can stall and pick up a project four years later and complete it. These are the lessons I learn from quilting.

Before I started quilting, I would never have seen myself as a quilter. Sometimes I'm reminded of that scene from Steel Magnolias, the one where the abrasive character Ousier (played by Shirley MacLaine) comes into the beauty shop flinging bags of tomatoes at everyone and says that she is giving them away because she hates them. One of the characters asks her why she grows them if she hates them, and her response is something like, "When you get to be an old lady like me, you have to wear stupid hats and plant a garden and grow tomatoes."

That's how I feel about quilting sometimes. Like, I guess I'm at the age when it's time for me to make quilts. Post-retirement (if I ever get back to work, post-Covid), I guess it will be water color painting. Again. 

Or clay. I'd like to get back to clay. So get your fucking vaccinations when it's your turn, okay, so I can do that.