Cleaning and Reorganizing

I realized yesterday after writing my post that I really love this “in between” time of the year. It’s the perfect time to rest and relax and it’s also the perfect time to clean and reorganize and prepare for the coming year.

Yesterday I did a bit of both and finished quilting the for the Winter Wonderland quilt! Yahoo!

After quilting, I took a few hours off for some awesome, mindless video game playing and then started cleaning up my downstairs studio so I could block the Winter Wonderland blocks.

I don’t think my studio has been in this bad of shape since I moved everything down there. It looks like a train ran through it, and then a plane crash landed!

I didn’t even have space to take the my design wall (styrofoam insulation) off the wall for blocking. I managed to find some space eventually and here’s all 13 blocks stretched out to dry.

It’s even messier than usual because we’ve been using the sewing room for a kitchen for the past 6 weeks.

The good news is, I’m finally able to put all my dishes and food back into the cabinets upstairs (yay!), but the bad news is we still don’t have a sink or stove top upstairs (ugh).

Josh and I are really getting sick of fast food and I’m getting really sick of having so much non-sewing stuff in my sewing room.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to share my space (for maybe 5 minutes!), but I really need my big tables clear so I can be free to baste all the quilt tops I’m going to work on in the beginner DVD.

I’ve decided that the best way to make this DVD is to think like a beginner and to work on simple quilting designs for a few days or weeks before I start filming.

And gosh, the number of quilt tops and projects I’ve unearthed during cleaning is staggering!

I thought I was pretty good about finishing projects once I started them, but oh no, I’ve got a closet chock full of quilt top monsters that I really need to quilt and finish.

Here’s a top I started, basted, but never quilted. I had trouble with the enormous amount of empty space at the top of this quilt.

I always felt like there should be something (maybe flowers?) coming out of the vases.

I also hated the purple border, so maybe some seam ripping is in order with this quilt.

One of my few unfinished landscapes:

The sun didn’t work out the way I was planning and it stopped the whole project in its tracks.

Maybe if I paint the white sky I will like this top better. I definitely need to get the pins out of it, they’re starting to rust!

Here are some fun, cheerful quilts I pieced awhile back and forgot about (there are 3 more, but I got lazy with photographing them all):

Here’s the little quilt I made this fall with the new Moda Eva fabric:

With all these quilt tops to quilt, it makes me wonder if I really should ever buy fabric again!

I’m already starting to realize that one of my New Year’s intentions will be to finish my UFOs (unfinished objects) and purge a lot of the quilting / crafting junk I’ve accumulated over the years.

I’m still holding onto crafting junk I bought when I was 12, which is a bit ridiculous. I keep it because I tell myself that “I will use this SOMEDAY!” but I never do, so it probably just needs to be given to a new home.

You know something cool? I found this on one of my dusty shelves:

This was one of my very first pieced quilts. I made it way back when I believed that the only way to piece accurate triangles was to paper piece.

I know the photo washed it out completely, but the fabric is actually a very light pink and white. It’s also super thin, which means it would have never made a very good quilt. Like I said, I didn’t know what I was doing at the time!

Here’s a quilt top I didn’t piece. I believe my dad bought it from a local quilter, but I’m not really sure on the story. It’s huge and definitely in need of some TLC.

And we can’t forget the Super Quick Quilt which was just recently pieced up in a day!

The sad thing about this whole list of quilts is that this isn’t even all of them! I think I have at least 10 more tops, but I WAS trying to clean, not dig all my skeletons out of the closets!

But it was super fun to look back at these old quilt tops. My style has definitely changed and I can see how my quilting and ability has transformed as well.

I think the biggest issue with many of these quilts is that one thing, one tiny little thing, made me go from excited about the project to ready to hang it up and forget about it.

Sometimes it was a bad fabric choice, color, or even simply an inability to “see” the quilting design.

Looking back at everything was really nice and the photos give me a perspective over the overall look of the quilt top that I can sometimes miss when I just sit and look at it.

So if you’re anything like me and have a closet full of quilt junk you will never use and a truck load of quilt tops that MUST be quilted before you die, pull em’ all out and start making a plan to finish them ALL in 2010.

Yes, we will have more than enough time! After all, we have 4 more days of 2009 to get started!

Let’s go quilt (or clean)!

Leah Day