Bye Bye, UFOs!

I loathe unfinished sewing projects. They languish for months, sometimes years, just waiting to be finished. When there are so many more interesting things to do and sew, it just prolongs to project almost to neverending UFO status. However, I am happy to report that two UFOs have achieved finished status: a kitchen table cloth that was begging for a rolled edge (yes, at least I can honestly say I was waiting for my new serger and followed through with that one) and my niece's baby quilt that I started in November of 2010. She was born in October of 2010 so it really is an embarrassingly late gift. Here are pics of the front and back of the quilt. There are a couple of reasons why it was so late, the latter one blaming the Internet of which I'll explain below.
Two days ago I picked up my great niece's baby quilt. One that I started last November. We knew it was going to be a girl so I picked up some nice baby quilt fabric on sale at fabric.com. Hot pink cotton flannel and a super soft tie-dye Minky. When those arrived, I took a trip to my local quilting shop to look at their cottons and found a nice yellow one to match the two fabrics. Then I spent another 4 weeks mulling over designs at emblibrary.com. For a while my embroidery machine was smokin', I stitched the designs and quilting fabric together for the front of the quilt, then I stopped. Why? Because I read something on the Internet lol. (That really is the truth!) Maybe I was at PR, but talk turned to quilt backing and someone was thinking about using a knit. Of course, I was using a knit, too, as the backing for my quilt. A few quilters chimed in about how it was a bad idea to use knit fabric as a backing. So what happened? It kind of stopped me dead in my tracks. Doubts creeped in. Maybe using Minky wasn't such a good idea. After all, I'm no quilter. Truthfully, I don't like to quilt, have never really done quilting other than a few specialty projects, and don't sew traditional quilts with fat quarters or anything like that. So that's when the quilt began to languish in my sewing cart.

For many months I thought about the backing. Maybe I could do this, maybe do that, then two days ago I just got fed up. Perhaps I simply got mad that the quilt was taking up so much space in my cart, but I said to myself, "I don't care what people use for their backing. I don't care about quilting naysayers that say knit fabrics shouldn't be used for the backing. I'm going to do it my way, and it's going to turn out great!

""Internet Paralysis" be damned.

So I did it MY way. And you know what? It turned out perfect. The quilt front is made out of quilting cotton and flannel, the back is super soft Minky, and two layers of quilt batting are sandwiched between both. I was going to make my own binding but decided to buy Wrights binding instead to save me some time and finish the project.

This project is one of those kind of lessons for me. Think of what I would do pre-Internet. And that would be just about anything. No one to ever say, "You shouldn't do it that way...That is not recommended...(blah, blah, blah...)" So there you go! I put in my virtual ear plugs, did it my way, and it turned out great!