Progress...

I have SO many UFOs... UnFinished Objects... in my studio. For many quilters, myself definitely included, the fun is in doing the piecing, and constructing a quilt back and doing the actual quilting is something to be set aside and hope, magically, that it will do itself. When I make one of my gazillion-piece, free-style works, I expect to do the quilting myself. I use the stitch-in-the-ditch method, because I don't want to distract from those gazillion pieces of fabric I've so cleverly woven into the finished project. I actually very much enjoy that process, and don't begrudge a moment of the time it takes, which is considerable. My problem is with the more-or-less "traditional" quilts I make. I don't have a clue as to how to quilt them.

For many years I just "sat" on my quilts by stuffing them into a huge UFO bin and figuring, one day, I'd take them to a professional long-arm quilter and let her worry about how to do the actual deed of quilting them. Recently, I've begun thinking about how I want to quilt some of them, and, though I'm not up to doing it myself, I realize I have some good ideas to pass on to a professional quilter to guide her (or him) in the direction I want to go. I realize I have a say in the color of thread, design motifs and other details the pro might use, and am not trapped into just surrendering my "child" to an automaton to do with as they wish. There are some very excellent and skilled long-armers out there, and they're becoming more and more prolific with ideas and designs to fit the quilt, and one doesn't have to be satisfied with a "medium meander" in a neutral thread color to get the task done. So, I'm looking at my quilts with a different eye these days, and deciding exactly what I want done to my creation, and am entitled to expect that the pro will be able to understand and execute my desires.

Several weeks ago I found a plastic baggie full of 12-14" blocks that had been stashed in a bin of scraps. I can't remember when I made these blocks, but it must have been a long time ago when I was first starting to work with African fabrics. I recognized many of the fabrics as being among the first African fabrics I purchased, back in the early '90s, after taking a fantastic class with Roberta Horton that was my initial exposure to African fabrics. Roberta opened an entire new world to me with her own marvelous African styled quilts, and I realized immediately I'd found my own niche in the quilting world. In 2000, the fabulous South African quilter, Lee Hackmann, was one of the teachers at PIQF - Pacific International Quilt Festival - held annually in Santa Clara, CA. I took three days of classes with Lee, and she literally changed my life. I learned to mix fabrics in a totally random way, discovered the individual pieces didn't have to be of uniform size and shape, experienced the freedom of points that didn't have to match, that quarter-inch seams weren't necessary and an eighth-inch seam was perfectly okay, learned that steam is my "friend", and a huge number of other "facts" of quilting that totally over-rode the established rules of quilting. What a sense of freedom, of release, of utter exuberance those realizations made. I incorporated all of Lee's rule-breaking techniques into my quilting style, and have never looked back.

These are the blocks I found...

After adding black fabric borders to each block and trimming them down to identical size, I added some sashing and borders, and came up with this...

Bingo!! All of a sudden, my UFO has become an FO, and I'm ready to take it to the long-arm pro and let her turn it into a masterpiece!