Unfinished Business

This week I will be featuring the projects that haunt me. Call them UFOs, call them WIPs, call them the ghosts of quilting past. These are the ones that make me feel the heavy burden of guilt whenever I gleefully begin a new project, or buy new fabric. We all have them - they trigger your mother's voice in your head when you reach for your Visa card in the quilting shop...."finish that one before you start something new".

I have been blogging for nearly a year now and I am ready to share my guilty little secrets with the blogosphere (and harvest your ideas for how to finish one of them off).
Today's featured quilt is actually the first quilt I ever made. It was done before the rotary cutting revolution and machine quilting (hence its unfinished state). By some miracle I still love the colours and the fabrics in it which increases its chances of getting off the UFO list. Forgive the creases - it has been folded up in our attic for many years.


It is a lap sized sampler and it is the quilt that started my addiction. The trouble is that I have started and almost finished hand quilting it and I never seem to have the time to just sit and stitch - I am either pushing fabric through the Janome full throttle or glued to the internet, fingers poised like claws over the key board - not the best position for hand quilting.


During the class that I took to make this quilt, the teacher said we should stitch in patterns and motifs that were significant to our lives at the time. In this vein, I was quilting while on holidays over New Year's and foolishly stitched in the date. By husband (evil man) thinks that this is hilarious and likes to bring it up in company. Often.


This is a back view of the quilt, but there it is in all its glory. '97 stitched into my very first quilt. I think it's time I got a move on and finished it off.

See you tomorrow with more flowers from my attic.