Visiting a UFO

          While spending long hours at the sewing machine as I do in the summer, my mind tends to wander. The more difficult the project, the more I find myself wishing that I could pull something out of a black bag that would be amazingly easy to whip up and would also look great when I finished it.

          Ultimately for me, that means mentally toying with almost every UFO I have hiding in the house.    

          For those of you among my friends and family who are not quilters, that DOES NOT mean that I have flying saucers in my house. It means that I have several----okay...MANY----unfinished objects tucked here and there in one room or another. Unfinished quilts, to be exact.

          Some are unfinished because I have run out of certain supplies that I need. Others hang on quilt racks waiting for room on the design wall or table. Many are patiently waiting in line for their turn at the sewing machine. Some are in a sort of limbo, biding their time until my brain figures how to accomplish one skill or another that is needed to complete them.

          Then there is the occasional quilt that is roughly folded, or even crumpled and shoved to the back of a drawer or into the dark recess of a trunk because I have made some sort of mistake. Yup, that's what I just said. Mistake. I do make them.

          A couple days ago, I found my mind wandering back to one such UFO--enough so that I decided to go visit the poor thing. I opened up the trunk where I had hid it a year or so ago, and there it was--crumpled up along with all of the pieces of fabric I had cut too small.

          The beginnings of the quilt actually looked pretty good. I had meticulously pieced 18 Stack-n-Whack wheels from an Asian-inspired fabric.



          That should have been the hard part, but it wasn't. It was when I went about incorporating them into a quilt top of my own design that I ran into trouble. I thought I was measuring carefully, but again and again, I cut through one expensive piece of fabric after another. When I finally thought I had the design licked, I realized that there was only room for 9 of my wheels rather than all 18. Unacceptable, after all that work I had put into them. Fortunately, I hadn't ruined those.

          Well, into the trunk that whole mess went. That was until the day before yesterday when I was finally curious enough to take a second look. I hadn't realized it, but somewhere in the back of my mind I had been trying to figure out how to fix the quilt. There must have been a small glimmer of hope burning inside me after all.

          Sometimes, our brains come up with some wonderful answers. As soon as I carefully laid the pieces out on my design table, the solution to the disaster was immediately clear. It was even simpler than my original design but looked better.

          Now I am happy. My innate urge to fix things has been satisfied. All the fabric that I did not cut correctly doesn't matter. No scrap will ever goes unused in my sewing room, anyway. I  am enthusiastic about working on this quilt again.

          Sometimes it's a good thing to visit a UFO.