AREA 51 CHALLENGE

My favorite photo from our trip

Ok, so we are back from Hawaii which is, in true Hawaiian style, just too wonderful a trip for words. If you’ve been to Hawaii, you know what I mean and if you haven’t run, don’t walk, to your travel agent and see how soon you can go! There’s nothing that matches waking up and falling asleep to the hum of the ocean. Not to mention water that doesn’t turn your extremities blue – big, big plus for an Oregonian.

Another big plus of the trip was knowing that I was coming home to my newly cleaned and tidied sewing room. (If you didn’t read the previous blog, check out the before and after pictures.) Visions of projects to complete danced in my head with every Hawaiian-style quilt I saw. Ideas for new projects popped up all the time…turtles need a turtle quilt and what about Bird of Paradise, and the ocean, and Kelly Gallagher Abbott’s “Empty Nesters” pattern which shows two middle-aged people dancing off into the sunset sea? This wave of new ideas found itself crashing on the rocky shores of UFO’s. (Un-Finished Objects.)

After 27 years of quilting, I’ve accumulated a pretty substantial UFO count. That’s not to say I don’t finish things, I do, but somehow in the “starting-more-than-I-finish” equation I’ve ended up about 60 or 70 UFO’s behind. I tried to solve this problem once by getting my daughter to promise she’d finish all my UFO’s after I died but as she got older she developed enough sense to ask, “Just how many are we talking about?” Her foot is firmly planted on the fact that she will take responsibility for no more than ten. This leaves fifty or sixty projects out in the cold and my newly-cleaned sewing room still packed with partial projects.

Enter Julie and Julia. I absolutely loved that movie! Not only did I love it, but I’ve decided to pose a J&J-style challenge for myself. A finish a week. Yep, that’s right, a finish….a down to the binding and label type finish 50 times in the next 52 weeks. (I gave myself an break for Christmas week and a few vacation days.)

Now, let me be clear here, I am not Super Woman. I will not be starting and finishing a quilt or project in a week. I am talking about finishing a myriad of half, three-quarters, or “just needs a binding” projects. I even have a few apron panels lying around and three fabrics for shirts for my husband that need making. At least one small charity quilt just needs a binding.

So, here’s the plan…Sunday nights or Monday morning I will post a photo of this week’s finish. And here’s a thought…if your sewing room is turning into the next Area 51, why not join me?
On your mark, get set, SEW!

Week 0 – finishes 0