Isn’t it a grand feeling 🎉when a quilt is rescued from the UFO pile and becomes the finished article? Imagine the feeling doubled 🎉🎉when two UFOs are completed within one month! Wahoo! And Wahoo!

Recently I’ve had an itch to sort out the many stashes of craft materials and UFOs I have tucked away in various cupboards around our home. I found a box of miscellaneous patchwork blocks including a whole set of blocks I’d pieced as I demonstrated different techniques in a series of classes held at Purple Stitches in 2022. (The block patterns were written by Viv Poon, owner of the shop). I pulled my blocks out of the box, arranged them on the design wall, deciding it was time they were made into a quilt.

I often stall in a project when I come up with complicated design ideas or fear my quilting will ‘spoil’ the carefully constructed patchwork. I discovered pulling a project from the UFO pile has a kind of freeing effect on all those design ideas and the need to achieve perfection disappears too. Contemplating this UFO my mind clicked into ‘just get it done’ mode. Great! I made some quick decisions:

• simple sashing and border without cornerstones;
• one piece extra wide backing;
• all over quilting design rather than quilting each block with a custom design.

I’m really pleased with the mottled dark blue sashing. I think it definitely provides enough contrast for each block to stand out.

The backing slowed me up a bit – my own fault for not purchasing quite enough fabric – I had to add a 6″ strip of blending fabrics but that gave me an opportunity to integrate a label into the backing ✅

For the quilting I choose to echo an arc from one corner across the quilt – this design was relatively quick to stitch and had the desired result of adding quilting without interfering with the patchwork designs.

I started to hesitate over the choice of fabric for the binding, I got myself back in ‘just get it done’ mode by choosing to use the same fabric as I’d used for the sashing. And so after four years of waiting the quilt was completed within the space of a week! 🎉

This successful finish and having my sewing space set up for quilting inspired me to reach for another UFO – this one was already pin basted, ready for quilting… A relatively new project, having been started at a retreat in March 2024. I’d designed it to use up a stash of 2½” squares and 2½” x 5″ rectangles I had been carefully cutting from fabric scraps. I used the squares to make a collection of nine patch blocks and the rectangles to make coin stacks. I decided to piece the nine patches together into on-point columns, adjust the coin stacks to the same length and use the background fabric to frame the columns.

Before consigning the patchwork to the UFO pile I had made it into a quilt sandwich, completed free motion petal designs over the nine patch blocks and then got stuck thinking about complicated free motion designs to fill the background…

But now, with that freeing ‘ just get it done’ attitude I decided upon:

• A fairly large scale free motion meander to fill all of the background fabric including the borders.
• And for the coin stacks to switch to a walking foot to utilise the wavy line stitch my machine does so well.

The binding had me dithering between using different blue scraps or going for a completely rainbow scrap look. As I tried various combos against the quilt I found one fabric in particular fitted the bill really well. Luckily the multicoloured fabric was an off-cut from an extra wide backing and there was plenty enough to cut into binding strips.

Ta-da! Another quilt finished ☺️

Are you inspired to take out an UFO and JUST GET DONE? I hope so!

Happy stitching!

Allison 🙂

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