Scrapdash: Insert quilt content here

Now, now, don't swallow yer tongue in shock, but I've got some quilt stuff to report.

Are you sitting?

I am counting my UFOs. I threatened to do that a few weeks back, and I have been following through. It seems, based on the stack of boxes I have to sort through, that this is one of those rare times I am following through.

Way back when I was first married and THOMY and I were living in what had been my grandma's house (400 square feet in which even the dust motes bumped elbows), one of my in-laws built for us a rolling kitchen cabinet. The kitchen was the largest room in that shoebox, but it offered zero counter space. We blessed my step-dad-in-law's heart thoroughly for such a hand-crafted gift and chopped many a vegetable on it.

Why mention the cabinet in this quilt content-only entry? Because now that we have a larger house from which we don't have to go outside to change our minds, we have more counter space, too, and the made-to-order cabinet is now my UFO cupboard in my sewing lair.

See? There was a point to all that.

So I've been going through that cabinet this week to count my unfinished projects. I thought I'd be staggered by the unripened fruits of my ADD ways, but I've discovered that most of the projects down there so far were not begun by me. Fourteen out of twenty UFOs prove that finishing what you start is not a strong character trait on EITHER side of my family.

So there. It's not my fault I'm a slacker.

And I can't say that I really want to finish all of these projects, either. There is enough polyester in some of those Rubbermaid storage boxes to reconstitute a dinosaur. A medium-sized one, like a herrerasaurus. (No, I didn't know what one of those were until tonight, but it seems to be the right dimension, so you and I both have been educated a little, huh? Thank you, Wikipedia.) There is what I can only believe to be drapery material, or else a heavy disco-era pantsuit fabric, incorporated liberally throughout the blocks. Slippery stuff one might make a dressing robe out of. And it is ALL hand pieced. My maternal grandma hand pieced each and every block I was given from her stash. So, if I try to finish one of her quilts, I am not going to rip out her stitches to straighten out her work. (And the schoolhouse blocks in particular need straightening like Quasimodo's posture.) I'm not sure what I'll do to make them work. If you have any suggestions that don't include deconstruction, I'm all eyes.

I am most intrigued by a set of butterfly shapes (bodies, upper and lower wing parts) I found among my paternal grandma's UFOs. They are all ready to be appliquéd as-is, if I were to needleturn appliqué them. But I don't like that method. I get headaches from holding everything too tightly. So, I'll probably opt for Eleanor Burns's method of pillow turn fusible appliqué. Those butterflies have a lot of 1960s color; they're great. They make ugly, cute.

As I keep recording how far behind I am, I'll keep owning up to the projects here. In the meantime, to see what I've unearthed so far, follow the links in the mosaic below: