Old UFO’s

The pile of UFO’s is not diminishing.  I HAVE to get busy on them but many of them no longer interest me.  Most of them have a sizeable investment of time and money so it’s irresponsible to not finish them.  Besides, every finished quilt can be donated to someone who could use a warm quilt this winter.

There is a laundry basket of projects under my sewing table and I’m determined to finish them or get rid of them by the end of the year.  This morning I worked on a little new project but this afternoon out came the UFO on top of the pile; a Dutchman’s Puzzle quilt.

I made the top as a sample for Thimbleberries Club several years ago and started quilting it on my Juki before it became an abandoned UFO.  Today I finished quilting the blocks; stitching in the ditch around the flying geese.

This quilting isn’t exactly “in the ditch.”  When stitching in the ditch I don’t like how some of the quilting is on the “high” side of the seam and some are on the “low” side so I usually outline the units a few threads outside the seam.  I’m not sure what the quilt police would say about that but I don’t quilt to please them!!  Another benefit of doing it this way is that I can match the thread to the background fabric and not worry about matching all the flying geese fabrics and changing threads for each color.

I also stabilized all the blocks and stitched in the ditch on both sides of the narrow inner border.  Now I’m going to load it on the frame and quilt the borders.  I’m always amazed at how fast a quilt gets finished once I pull it out of the UFO pile.  Now I just need to do that a couple of hundred more times!!