Gemm and Terry,

Yep, no matter how wonky, every quilted thing can have a purpose. I used some old fabric sandwiched to make a "practice Quilt" for my very first attempt at using my long arm....I just stitched, then doodled, switched gears and tried writing my name and finally attempted a bit of a pentagram on it. Yep it was a mess....I was going to toss it, my sister insisted I put a binding on it and use it for "something" Well...yeah...it works well to cover the back seat of the car when taking the dog somewhere!

No, don't wait. I say that because I've also got a stack of tops waiting to be quilted, and I own a LA with prostitcher, so I've got no excuse for not quilting them up.

The plain fact is that I love piecing more than I love quilting, so I'm always ready to start a new top, does not matter how many I've got ready to quilt or even how many others I'm working on.

I do believe in "done is better than perfect" but that does not have anything to do with skill, it has to do with making decisions. I could agonize over the "perfect" quilt motif, and take weeks to decide, but instead I find one that I like and stop looking. Is it the "perfect" pattern? Maybe, maybe not. However I've got a few extra special tops I want to do some elaborate FMQ on, and those I will wait until the time is right (like after the kitchen remodel is done). But most of them will be fine with an allover pattern and then they'll be given away and the person that gets them will love them the way they are.

This is an interesting thread! I am copying a fellow quilter’s (now deceased, sadly) mindset. She was a prolific quilt maker and always sent them out to a long armer. She was on a very limited income, so she put together many quilts, both ones that were intended for a certain someone, and ones that she just enjoyed putting together out of her stash. She had a wonderful gift for putting fabrics and patterns together that always worked. Anyway, when a gift giving occasion came up, which happened often as she had many grandchildren, she would invite the giftee to go through her impressive stash of finished tops in her cedar chest and pick one. Then she would send it out to be quilted. I don’t have a lot of space for finished quilts, so am doing the same thing. Flimsys take up less space and I enjoy making what I want to, with no second guessing and worrying that the person won’t like it, and they don’t have to wait forever for me to get one done. I have never had a complaint! Lol…

I would finish them, perfect or not. There's a good chance that if you don't finish them and either enjoy them or give them to someone who will, they will end up in your estate sale and sold cheap, given to charity thinking someone may finish them, or worse yet thrown away because no one in your immediate family knows anything about quilting and wouldn't know where to start to finish them themselves or have them finished or may not want to spend the $ needed to have them finished.