I'm back with a finish!
Hello, all! It's been a while, but finally I have a finish!
The Quilt: I was in a group called The Scrappy Bees. We met every couple of months to exchange blocks, and for the February 2006 (yes, 2006!!!) exchange, we swapped red and pink hearts on white-on-white.
Why it became a UFO: I'm not really into red, pink, or hearts, so I put my squares aside, packing them into a box along with the instruction sheet we'd gotten with the exchange, which recommended putting them together into four-heart blocks arranged sort of like large flowers. There they sat until this year's categorization of UFO's and commitment to finish thereof.
Why finish? Honestly, I could have given these blocks away, but I got to looking at them and thought, instead of a quilt, maybe I could make something else with them. I'd been wanting a fitted crate cover for my larger dog's crate, and this would be a fun challenge, so why not?
The enthusiasm of lockdown was upon me, and I measured and sewed busily!
But then came a dark time of being incredibly busy, then a dark time of being incredibly lazy. I still wanted to keep up with my UFO commitment, but each time I glanced at the quilting room and the partially completed panels hanging on the design wall, what had seemed like a "fun challenge" suddenly seemed overwhelming and too hard, and I just wanted to give up and do something fun and easy, but no, I had told myself that I was not going to continue this UFO-ing! When I started to finish something, I was going to finish finishing it, doggone it!
So, finally, I managed to get myself in gear. I made masks, but did sections of the crate cover project in between. At some point the "hard parts" were past, and it was like I had struggled up a mountain, reached the summit, and was now able to coast down the other side with a lot more enthusiasm as I got closer to finishing. The bias binding to get around the inner and outer bends was actually fun (did the "giant square sewed into a parallelogram / tube" thing to create a continuous strip of bias binding, and of course I ended up short and had to hastily make some more). Once it was done, I loved it!
The quilt's fate: For a heart-spangled project that sat around for 14 years receiving zero enthusiasm, it's funny that now I'm truly feeling the love, and I can't wait until we're able to attend dog events again so that I can show this one off on my dog's crate!