Coming out of the Closet!

Our guild speaker cancelled on short notice, so I agreed to do a part of the program at last night's meeting. As you know if you follow my blog, I have been thinking a lot about my UFO problem. In January I  made a wish list of projects I would like to finish and posted it on my sidebar. I thought that it might be interesting, or at least validating for some fellow guild members, to see a part of my problem! So I dug into some closets, cabinets and drawers and pulled out a few quilt tops.
These are 19 of the quilt tops that I excavated in the afternoon of the meeting. Of course there are some closets and cupboards that I didn't even open, but these were the first ones I found. Then I made an assessment and asked each one... "What is your problem?" It was very enlightening to determine why each project had not been finished.
The most common reasons were:
-waiting for quilting ("I'm going to hand quilt that one"!)
-waiting for borders (boring!)
-needing more of a specific fabric that I haven't yet found (I like to shop!)
-waiting for a miracle (I hate it!)
I acknowledge that each of these quilt tops have taught me something about what I enjoy, what colours I like, what techniques I prefer, and each of these projects improved my quilting skills a little more.
The quilts that were waiting for borders...that's just my own lazyness/procrastination, and I decided to put them in a pile to be finished "soon". The quilts waiting for quilting, well, one of my fellow guild members took pity on me and offered to help me with that (more details to come in a future post).
And the quilts waiting for miracles, I decided to do something drastic. I had so much fun with adopting my friend's UFO last month (click here to read about that) that I decided maybe someone else would enjoy taking one of my failures UFO's home with them! So, I put 3 projects up for adoption at the guild meeting.
This gold/teal mystery quilt was missing the pattern but had some leftover fabrics to go with it, so maybe Pat F. the enthusiastic, adoptee quilter will figure it out with the remaining pieces, or make up her own layout.

This brown one, which I really disliked, still has a few borders with it, one of which is a pieced checkerboard and is already sewn together, however, the original pattern was MIA...I think it might have been a mystery project from the late 90's. It was adopted by Lori S. and she has a person in mind to finish it for...I was so excited about that!


And this yellow and blue QST quilt was made from a block swap in the early 90's and I just never liked it.  No one at the meeting wanted to take it home and it was feeling very dejected,  so a fellow guild member signed up a certain blog stalker of mine, who lives in Northern Ontario, to be it's new owner!! How about that...winning a quilt top draw by proxy! Poor her :)

So 3 of my UFO's are no longer my concern, and I can focus on the projects I still really like. I had to admit at the meeting that 1 of the quilts I found, I have no memory of making! I cannot remember the pattern but do remember one of the fabrics, which was a favorite of mine a long time ago...oh dear!
And I also have to admit that of the 17 UFO's on my wish list, only 5 of them made an appearance at the meeting last night (# 4 which is finished and I'll show later in the week, #6, #7, #11, and #16).
I know I have a long way to go, but last night felt like a good step in the right direction. Now if only I could find UFO # 14...maybe I should check that closet at the back of the laundry room?