The long road ahead

Have you ever looked at your UFO pile of projects and felt a sharp stabbing pain in your chest? I gathered all of mine this week, all 43 quilt tops, 13 on-the-go half made projects and thought "this is going to be impossible". I don't know where to start. I looked online for helpfull advice, but alas all I found was more followers to my great cause of project loving and not being able to close the deal. I'm sure you can all sympathize with me, everyone's had that one project that has sat forever, you know the one, "finish in a weekend!" and in reality it takes you years....

I think I've found a somewhat plausible and doable solution. It's a step by step program. Follow me here and tell me what you think.

1. Gather all your projects in one place and sort them by size and by what stage they are on. (needs quilting, needs sandwiching, still needs some borders or blocks finished).

2. Take the projects needing sandwiching and match those up with backing fabric that you have on hand. Sandwich these then put them in the "ready to quilt pile". Wow sees you've just reduced your stash by one whole pile! Congrats!

3. Take the projects that need borders and get the fabric from your stash for the borderd and match these up. Set these aside layering them in a rubbermaid tote container. (I love using the long narrow ones for under beds and I use less folds in my quilts and they stack neatly under my quilting station.

4. Now this process is supposed to help you feel as though you're making an impact on those ufo's so at this stage you need to go to the "ready to quilt" pile and grab the smallest one there and go ahead and quilt it. Whoopee, now you've actually made twice the difference you did two steps ago. Congrats!

Next week I'll go through the next steps, however until then, measure all the quilts that needs quilting and go ahead and make your binding for them and put the binding in a sandwich bag and pin to the quilt so it doesn't get lost. This step helps you on the finishing step, when the binding is already made, you can quickly transition from quilting straight to binding that quilt and getting it on a bed.

See you next week for the second step!

Cheers

Rhonda