Why I Have 27 UFOs

Two or three years ago, I counted how many UFOs (Unfinished Objects) I had in my quilting room. I found 27. About 6 months ago, when I counted again, I still had about 27. The number doesn't seem to change, despite the fact that these are not the exact same 27 projects. This past weekend, I made the mistake of opening the ironing board cabinet. This is the place where bits and pieces that aren't even real projects go to hide. These are mostly orphan blocks leftover from quilts I finished years ago. They don't even count as UFOs, because their project was finished.

But when I see them, can I leave them be? Of course not. With just a few borders, they make great neonatal quilts that I can practice machine quilting on. So now, I have 5 more UFOs.



I've been machine quilting, so I actually just finished the 4 projects shown below. And I am working on the binding of one more quilt, so I will then officially still have 27 UFOs. Maybe there is some sort of universal conservation law behind this.



This is a small wallhanging. It is based on a Fibonacci spiral, but I cheated on the last quarter of the spiral so it wouldn't get too big. The blocks were leftover from another project.



Two more neonatal quilts made from leftover blocks or ones I tried making and decided I didn't want to make a quilt from.



I call this my Monkey Bars quilt. It is made from rectangles I swapped with a couple of quilty friends. I tried a bamboo-cotton blend for batting, and it shed a lot of fibers from the edges during the quilting process and when I pulled the quilt out of the dryer after the first wash it had little batting pills all over it. The batting is very thin and drapey.



This is the back of the Monkey Bars quilt. I hate buying large cuts of fabric (I like to maximize the variety in my stash), so I piece most backings from fabric I already have. That way, the quilt is reversible and I don't have to make an extra trip to the fabric store to get a backing for a specific quilt.

January Book Club

The January Book Club pick for Nene Reads is Old Man's War, by John Scalzi:

"Boldly going where no old person has gone before, to seek out new life and new civilizations and exterminate them."

This was my pick, because I thought it was fun, readable, and had some interesting ideas. It's about a 75-year old man who joins the Colonial Defense Force so he can get a new body and become young again. It's less idealistic and peaceful than Star Trek, and probably more realistic. In it, humanity takes pre-emptive strikes to a whole new level.



I hosted book club this time, which means cleaning the house and rearranging the furniture, borrowing chairs from the neighbors and preparing a spread of snacks. And quite a few of my neighbors are Foodies, so a bag of chips and a jar of salsa just isn't going to do it. We had pasta salad, nuts, 3 cheeses with crackers, fresh veggies with yogurt dip and hummus, peanut butter cookies, blackberry cobbler, spinach-feta puffs (photo above), and apple-raisin pastry with brie (photo below). Oh, and yummy lentil soup that my friend Patty made. This was my first adventure with puff pastry. I should have probably taken a picture of what the braided pastry looked like when it got out of the oven, but I didn't. So this is a process photo mid-way through the braiding process.



It turned out fine. But I'm tired.

Evil Overlord Scarf

Not much quilting has gotten done lately, but I have been experimenting with knitting and crochet. Above is my Evil Overlord Scarf. For those of you who have seen "Despicable Me" (which is hilarious, by the way), this is just like the scarf the villain/hero Gru wears in the film. I saw it, and I knew I had to make one. I don't much like knitting with needles, so I decided to trying a knitting loom. This scarf is meant to be long and narrow, and it is, quite appropriately, 13 stitches wide. I had to make my own loom spacers to get a gauge this fine, the ones the loom came with gave a stitch that was too loose.




And this is the crochet scarf I started last month. I don't know if it will ever get done. This is the first scarf I tried to crochet, and I did not fully realize just how many yarn ends would need to be woven in when I changed colors so often, or just how long it would take. Or how much of a pain in the @$$ it would be. So, this project is on the slow road to completion. Every now and again I'll pull it out and weave a few tails in. Then I'll give up and put it away again for a while. I have noticed that the ends of the tails I've already woven in tend to poke out again over time, so I keep having to trim them again. And now you know why this project may never get done.

Three Tops

Soooo, some progress has been made, if not in actual completed quilts, then at least in quilt tops, YAY! Here are the two quilt of valor tops that I made from this block set. Still have 12 blocks leftover, but I think I'll put them in a wall-hanging or on the pillowcases I'll make for the QOVs to go in after they are completed. I don't know whether I should really count both of these as done, since the one with the red border has a bit of border ripple. Apparently the numerous seams in the piano-key inner border caused some stretch and I may need to do some ripping and re-sewing on that one. I hate having to re-sew, so I'm going to put it away and not think about it!


This top is a baby quilt for a neighbor. I had the blocks tucked away from an experiment in designing my own rectilinear blocks. I think of them as log cabin pattern variations. I call this design "circuit boards," and I have a set with light backgrounds and one with dark backgrounds. The light ones went into this quilt, the dark ones are still in a stack in my quilt room. I was 4 blocks short, so I made more and put sashing and a couple of borders on when I realized that the baby shower was coming up soon. The mom-to-be told me she wanted to learn to quilt, so I don't intend to finish this one for her. I'll help her learn how to quilt it or tie it (and I'll even tell her about long-armers who will machine quilt it for you if you pay them, in case she chickens out).

Nene Reads Book Club

I summarize every book club read in one sentence and read it out at the meeting.



We did two book clubs this month because October's was postponed. The First book we read was The Tenderness of Wolves, by Stef Penney: "A murdered trapper is found in his cabin, and two dozen people take off into the Canadian wilderness in winter searching for lost relatives, murder suspects, other searchers, dead bodies, and a new home."

You may think that 2 dozen is an underestimate, but trust me, it isn't. The book was pretty good and the characters well-drawn, although there is a lot that is left out and at the end, it pretty much just stops and you don't really know what happens to most of the characters. And who the h@#$ is Half-Man, anyway?!?


The second book was Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout: "Thirteen stories of people living lives of quiet desperation in Maine."

Olive Kitteridge was well-written, but I had a hard time getting over the fact that it is really a bummer and Olive is not an especially likeable person (although she does have her moments). And it felt a bit voyeuristic at times.

January is my month to pick a book. I have 3 or 4 possibilities, what shall I torture them with next, hmmm. . .

I'm ba-ack!

Soo. . .I've been a total slacker and haven't posted anything in a month. I haven't posted in so long, I forgot my password and had to reset it (I hate passwords. I can never remember them unless I write them down, and how secure is that?)!

I actually have done some quilting, though, yay!



I made so many stars, I decided to make 2 quilts of valor (and I actually have 12 more blocks left over. Hmm, maybe that was a little overkill). The first one is set on point with setting triangles rather than squares and the rows offset. I like the zigzag line the setting triangles form. I sewed all the blocks together and added an inner border and "auditioned" 3 fabrics for the outer border and I don't like any of them. How can I not have a good blue border when I have a dresser and a bookshelf full of fabric???



And here is the second one, a straight set with alternating lattice blocks. I heven't sewed the rows together yet and I'm still thinking about borders. I have some rail fence units cut from the strip sets I used to make the 9-patch centers of the star blocks, and I may sew them together to make a blue and white piano key-type border.

Solar Water Heater

We had a solar water heater installed last month. It took almost 3 days to put the system in (complete with crawling around in our tiny attic). It runs antifreeze through a solar collector on the roof. There is a pump that moves the antifreeze through a heat exchange coil in the hot water heater when it is hot enough. The system has an electric backup, but we turned it off. The system produces hot water every sunny afternoon. I only turned on the electric backup one cloudy Sunday afternoon when I did three loads of laundry and ran the dishwasher. So far it works fine running it this way, although I expect sometime this winter we may have to keep the backup system on.


I'm working on a Quilt of Valor. I've been making star blocks from one of the Nickel Quilt books by Pat Speth.