Resurrecting a UFO
It’s my Farmers Wife Sampler…
I’m going through another attack of feeling like I’m never getting anything finished. It always hits me around the time of the Pacific International Quilt Festival as that is the time when all my Dorcas buddies start entering their quilts into the competition. They start asking each other “what are you going to enter?” and the answers are along the lines of “Well I have about 5 quilts I can chose from but I can’t quite make up my mind. What category should I go for this year? Handquilting, best embellishment, Modern quilts, best handwork?” And I sit there with my mouth clamped shut because I have only one quilt finished (to be honest almost finished) to enter.
So I start beating myself up for not working on my pile of UFOs (unfinished quilts). Then I either start new projects that eventually go into the Bookcase of Dreams, or I spend time making out a daily schedule, don’t follow it, and end up going on in my haphazard way. If I could only keep to a schedule I might be able to get 2, maybe 3, quilts done instead of waiting until the last minute to finish just one quilt in time for a PIQF entry.
Now I do have some good excuses because I do have deadlines for class samples, social media commitments, and so forth. But I always end up telling myself if I could just do one block a day on some project, or spend 1 hour a day hand quilting another project, I could actually have something finished for show entries and I could get that good feeling that comes from going to my guild meeting and holding up a finished project at show and tell. But I seem to forget all that when something new waves a hand at me and says “ you hoo you would really like to get started on me, don’t you?” I cave in every single time.
So I’m back at the stage of trying to rededicate myself to a project I do love and want to finish, or at least get the quilt top finished. I haven chosen my Farmers Wife Sampler. It has been sitting in its shoebox in the Bookcase of Dreams for I don’t know how long. I will have to look through my past lists of UFOs to see when I started it. I did grab the shoebox when I went to my quilt retreat last month mainly because I knew the hand pieced blocks would catch the eye of many quilters who would in turn ask about it and remark that they couldn’t believe I hand pieced the blocks. So then I could puff out my chest and proudly declare yes, I was a hand piecer. And a very skilled one at that.
Since I’ve gotten back from the retreat, I have managed to almost finish putting another row together and now I have to sew that row onto the others. This is a very tedious part of the top construction. It is full of bias seams and I have to be very careful not to stretch them. Hopefully if they do pucker I can get them back into shape by torturing them with my steam iron, plenty of misting, and whacking them with my clapper.
What is a clapper you say? It is a block of wood used by tailors (I do have a tailor in the family, my mother, who taught me this trick). After pressing the heck out of a seam, if it won’t behave and still insists on bulging up, mash it with the clapper. The wood absorbs the steam and encourages the fibers to microscopically shrink up so that your seam attains a knife edge type of sharpness and obeys you like a well trained dog. My daughter bought me this fancy clapper but any piece of unfinished two by four will work. My mother used a wooden block from my brothers’ building set. It was confiscated after one of them threw it at the other and it put a dent into our carved wooden bookcase.
But I digress. I am aiming at adding this row to the top and also putting some time into finishing hand quilting another block of my Nursery Rhyme quilt. If you recall, I entered it into the East Bay Heritage Quilters show in April. I got probably 95% of the hand quilting done and then followed my friend Janet’s advice to just put it in the show and no one will notice that some of the blocks were unfinished. As it was a non-judged show, I did that. But now it’s entered in PIQF, a judged show, so I have got to get everything done so the eagle eyed judges won’t give me a dreaded “needs improvement” in the quilt design area. Wish me luck.