What better way to spend a rainy day than trying to clean up my sewing area? Yeah, I can think of better too but for some reason I was overcome with a need to organize. In November all my sewing stuff, which was arranged in a reasonable manner, had to hastly move to the other side of the basement to make way for construction. Silly me I thought that this would be a relatively short process at which point we would fix up the other side of the basement into a proper sewing room. Right. 10 months later the first side isn’t finished.

I started organizing by clearing junk. Then I started going through boxes. That’s when I had to confront the UFO box. UFOs in quilting terms are UnFinished Objects. I have a box that I keep swearing that I’m sending off to charity because I’ll never finish them. Some are from swaps. Others are stuff I started but my enthusiasm wore off. I started looking at things last night and now I’m conflicted. Some of the stuff is really nice. That’s the reason that they have survived previous purges. I can’t quite let them go. But since all my finished quilts are given away I don’t know what to do with them either.

Here’s the list:

1. A set of 50 12 inch blocks from a swap.
2. An almost done set of blocks for a quilt for my cousin’s baby. I think the kid is about 3 now. It is alternating paper pieced animals and setting blocks.
3. A quilt made from t-shirts I bought in Bolivia and Costa Rica. This is all together and even has one side of the border on it.
4. A finished top made from hourglass blocks that I got in a swap I was in monthly for over a year.
5. Enough hourglass blocks to make another top.
6. My Y2K quilt. In 1999 a big thing in online quilting was to collect small squares of fabric from quilters all over the world. They would also send a small square with their name and location. Some of those are really fancy. The idea was to make a quilt with 2000 pieces and all the signatures. It is 2005. Enough said.
7. A rabbit/garden quilt from a round robin swap I did. My rabbit had just died when I needed to come up with a theme. He died in 1999. Apparently 1999 was not a good year for me to get things done.
8. An underwater quilt from another round robin. This one was designed as a kid’s wall quilt. It uses lames and other shiny fabrics in addition to cotton to make great underwater blocks. Probably pre-1999. But I still don’t have a kid so I could make it up and not be too late.
9. House blocks. This was another swap. I have a group of the most creative house blocks I’ve ever seen.
10. Assorted random blocks left over from projects that I started and then didn’t like.

After all the cleaning I decided to pack up the assorted random blocks and the leftover hourglass blocks to ship off to charity. I may send the 50 12 inch blocks too. My problem is that I usually end up trying to ship packages that weigh a ton. That would be a good weight.

I also resolved to finish a few of these projects. Last night I started on the t-shirt quilt. I decided that it needed to be longer. I decided to add a row of hourglass blocks to the top and bottom. Did I have any hourglass blocks in the right colors for this quilt? Of course not. Not a green one in the bunch. So I start making hourglasses. I got it about half done before I got tired. This is why I never get anything done. I couldn’t just slap the other three sides of the border on the quilt. Nope. I have to add.

I’m hoping my public airing of the UFO situation will encourage me to finish all most at least a few of them. To aid this I am taking my UFO box to work today to show my quilt-loving coworkers what I have. I am expecting to be soundly yelled at for letting these things sit in my basement and then nagged about finishing them. I’ll post pictures as I finish.