Lots of UFOs finished up-- it's a theme

 With our kitchen remodel going on longer than expected, and my sewing room literally the only room in the house that's not impacted by the construction, I've had some motivation to spend more time finishing up random works in progress (WIP) / unfinished objects (UFOs).

The February "Make a Thing a day" challenge on Facebook helped me keep on track too.

Hot pads

Pattern weights made out of "mistake" printed fabric.  I made a bunch of PECs symbol bean bags for Daniel to help him learn new symbols as we added them to his Dynavox voice output computer.  Obviously, for this page I forgot to reverse the printing.  I find these funny. 

This bed runner or wall hanging is actually a Morse Code Abecedarian.  I liked this, but got stalled in finishing it when I realized that it just wasn't going to be all square and perfect.  I decided to just get it done and embrace the wonkiness.  My imprecise wavy lines ended up creating a cool texture in the finished piece, and I like it again.

I took 5 orphaned blocks left from an Eleanor Burns quilt challenge and stitched them into a table runner.    I did free motion quilting in a black to silver variegated thread on the solid black background in addition to matched thread quilting on the colored elements. My son's cat Sol approved of the end result. He didn't get to keep it though.

I cut these clamshell blocks out about 6 years ago.  They're from a fat quarter bundle I bought impulsively while Daniel was hospitalized.  The colors in this photograph are not quite accurate -- these are intense oranges, greens and yellows, with some blue.  I decided that the thing that was keeping me from progressing was that I wasn't quite happy with the color balance.  I considered adding white or gray clamshells., but that didn't make me happy either.

 

What worked for me was pulling a blue fat quarter from my stash, in addition to purchasing 2 other blue fat quarters.  I feel like having more blue helps pull the other colors together.

The clamshell blocks are slow stitching for me.  I actually timed myself and it take me a full 30 minutes to piece a row.  So this small quilt is going to take 8 hours of stitching for just the pieced top.  I have fabrics from my stash for backing and binding, so this one should be pretty easy to finish up.

The finish it up theme continues, because yes, I have still more WIP and UFO in my sewing room.  Stay tuned.