Reducing

 

Ha! Fooled ya! Bet you thought it was about weight loss! Well, it is in a way.

Several years ago I stopped and took stock of my quilting life. I had recently retired from a longterm (28 year) job and took a look at my quilting room. Ugh! It was rife with unfinished objects and works in progress. Not to mention some of the most unbelievably ugly fabric!

I started by going through the fabric and donating quite a bit of it to the guild charity quilts and to various other charitable organizations. This fabric was not only cotton quilting fabric but slinkies, and polys, and lions, and tigers and bears. Oh my! That was a start.

The next step was to go through all the projects. I had so many that I couldn't even remember all of them. The solution was a simple spreadsheet that not only lists the project but the steps it would take to complete it. When I started the spreadsheet, I believe there were about 65 or so projects on it. Gulp. Do you notice that it is now down to 19? And of those 19, there are actually 2 projects that aren't commited, so in essence they aren't real projects yet.

Anyway. As I complete either a step in the project or the whole thing, I cross it off.

See the entry for Bamboo? I have finally figured out why, after 30 years of aging on the shelf, I never went any further with this quilt. It started life as a final project in an art class in college. Even though it has never been finished I got an "A" on it for concept! I painted a bamboo grove on 18x22" muslin blocks with dye-paints and 30 years ago the selection left a lot to be desired. It was assymetrical and reminded one of oriental art. It sat until about 5 years ago when I dug it out and overdyed it using a scrunch method and a dark green fiber reactive dye. Better, but still something wrong with it. What? Light bulb moment! The bamboo was fine when viewed on each individual block. But when the blocks were combined, the design was too small. So you will notice that I have it marked on the matrix to repurpose. I will be doing something else with this, but not a quilt. I've thought of a triptych or maybe postcards where the bamboo is painted. There are a lot of unpainted areas that will be fodder for the scrap bins: a lovely sueded-look green.

And another change to the matrix is that I have decided to hand-quilt the 30's fan quilt. This screen capture does not reflect that change.

So there you have it, Diane, HTH!