In a heroic effort to score some awesome charm packs a couple of days ago, I was commenting to
Meg about how this time of year is generally when I take a hard look at my unfinished projects. I take stock of what's there, what's left to do to finish them, and I try to assess which projects will be easiest to finish before the end of the year, so I can add more pictures to my end of the year mosaic. That way, I can end the year with
as much closure as possible.
Though you'd never guess it by the looks of things around here, I've been in (silent) closure mode the past couple of weeks now. In addition to the mad quilting I've been doing on the husbatron's NCSU quilt, I have a stack of 4 quilt tops with their pieced battings and 2 basted quilt sandwiches, all of various sizes (crib-sized to almost king), sitting in the corner of my sewing room. I desperately want to finish those quilts, if only to declutter them and get them up off the floor.
I also have a list of 14 charm pack projects/tutorials I blithely scribbled down back through April and May, and I assumed it wouldn't be a problem at all to crank out the quilts and their accompanying tutorials by the end of this year (Denial anyone?). I desperately want to finish those projects, because I can't wait to see if the reality matches my vision for them. And because I keep buying charm packs and need to do something with them.
After revising my October - December 2011 Craftiness To Do List for the umpteenth time in the past week, I stopped for a minute, wondering. "Why do I even care how many quilts I finish before the end of the year?" If you pulled out any given quilt in my cabinet o' quilts and asked me "When did you make this?" I wouldn't reply, "Oh, I started that in September 2009 and finished it in May 2011."
Instead, I'd say, "Hmm, let's see, I started that the week I got married to deal with all the stress of last-minute wedding planning so I didn't kill my mother, and I finished it right after we planted tomatoes for the first time on our back porch a few years later." (Note the fledgling tomato plant photobomb action to the left of the finished quilt.)
Or I'd say, "Well, I started that right after my parents moved far, far away because I was sad, and then I finished the binding while sitting on the couch in their new house almost a year later."
Takeaway: I tend to associate quilts with other things going on in my life at the time I worked on them, not by arbitrary start and end points on the Gregorian calendar. (Apparently, I also tend to start new projects under great emotional duress.) I guess it makes sense. Quilting isn't my life. I happily devote a lot of my spare time and mental space to it, but it's still part of my small, but full life. I guess all I'm saying with this blathering introspection is that deep down, I don't want 2011 to necessarily be the year where I got a lot of quilting sh*t done and had an awesome mosaic to show for it at the end of the year mosaic-fest in blogland. When I do look at my mosaic for the end of the year, I don't want to feel guilty about all the WIPs sitting in the corner, untouched for months. I don't want to let myself get all anxious, looking at all the items that haven't been crossed off the To Do Lists I've set up for my
hobby. I want to be excited about the stash I still have to use and eager to try new patterns with fun fabrics.
Here's to the last couple of months of 2011. I hope you find lots of joy in your sewing time, even if your seams are all crooked like mine.
Sorry for the angsty post. I just needed to get it out of my system and preach to myself more than anything else. I'll be back tomorrow with another color palette.
Oh, but if you're interested in any of my closure thus far, I forgot to mention that I set up a "
Finished Quilts" page last week.
