November UFO Sightings

One of my 2022 goals was to touch every single one of my WIPs*.  The year is almost over and I was five projects away from this goal at the beginning of the month.  Some of them had been untouched for so long, they were practically at UFO status!  My November mission was to look at each of them at least once.  I'm going to go through them in the order I pulled them out.

Rainbow Blossom (January 2019)
My first untouched project was practically finished. It only needed two more text blocks, maybe a filler block, and a little bit of assembly.

I already had the fabric picked out for the next block, so starting here was an easy decision.  I made my "twinkle" block and did a little assembly to set it in where the yellow fabric is laying in the photo above.

I still need to make the "create" block and I'm stumped on which fabric to use.  Kristy also posted a teaser picture of one of her new patterns for the next pattern club and I think it would fit in so perfectly - do I put this away and let it sit until she releases it?

Mother (February 2021)

I know exactly why I quit working on this quilt: two appliqué blocks right in a row.  I had plans to convert them to paper-pieced blocks and never got around to it.

For the sake of this challenge, I jumped ahead a few months and made two of the blocks that weren't appliqué.  Both of these are paper-pieced and they came together quickly.

I now have five complete blocks and two untrimmed teardrop shapes that need to be set into rectangles.  I remember that there was a trick to get the teardrops to come together nicely and I decided that I'll make the remaining five teardrops and then set them all at once so I don't need to relearn that trick multiple times.

Summer Sampler 2019 (May 2019) 

A happy surprise!  My notes said that I had fifteen blocks done, but I actually had sixteen.  And they were clearly labeled with the layout I put together the last time I had them out.

I'm not sure where the original instructions for this block are, but I know that there was a hexi block in this quilt-along so I drafted my own paper-pieced pattern to make one.  One of my sons made me a cardboard hexi template and the other one picked the random distribution of colors for me (he labeled the pattern with red, yellow, and black, but I picked the actual fabrics out myself).

A few of the points don't line up exactly, but you can't tell at a distance.  With only three blocks left to go, this should be an easy finish.

Football Quilt (July 2017)

This is a very old project, and probably has been untouched for the longest amount of time.  My then four-year old (who is now a 4th grader!) sat on my lap while we sewed most of the original parts together, but then lost interest.  I put it away because I was stuck on what to do next.  I had a panel that I had planned on adding but I didn't like the colors of it.

After a lot of thinking, I came up with a plan for using the panel, and it involved sewing some uprights!

I still haven't cut into the panel, but now that I have a plan maybe it won't be five years before I touch this again!

Book Nerd (November 2016)

The oldest and still untouched.  Only having one UFO left going into what is going to be a busy December seems much more manageable than five!  I know I still have two days left in the month, but they are going to be used to attach a binding and work on my postage stamp quilt so I just won't get to this one.

In conclusion, I'm so glad that I made the time to look at everything.  The common themes seem to be construction method and fabric selection; I love paper-piecing and scrappy projects but both are time consuming.  Sometimes I just want to sit down and chain piece without thinking about what fabric I'm using!  I don't dislike any of these projects, so keep your eyes peeled in 2023 for more progress on them!

* For some reason, I really thought this was one of my 2022 goals - I've been tracking my untouched projects in my monthly recap posts and in my quilt tracking spreadsheet.  But when I went to link to the goals in the first paragraph it wasn't on there!  And my midyear review doesn't reference this particular goal either.  So I guess this was just a personal, non-published goal.  It's not shameful secret and I have no idea how this happened.  Regardless, I'm happy to add it to the "official 2022 goal list"!