Fickle Quilter Challenge~~Save a UFO

Are you a fickle quilter?  You know, one of those quilters who has great ideas and then figures out that it wasn't so great? 

I am one fickle quilter, let me tell you!  My deal, however, is that I get tired of the working through part.  I start.  I get stuck.  I allow my brain to percolate.  My percolating brain begins percolating on another idea, and the original one gets put   

on the opposite side of the work table--the kiss of death!  After lingering in the defunct neighborhood for a while, it gets buried in the UFO cemetery--a basket in a hard-to-reach place in the closet. 

Wait! an epiphany...I could make something new.  Since I've been into Modern Quilts, I decided that using the blocks to make a impromptu modern quilt would work quite nicely.  

I decided to set some boundaries just to help me focus (who knows what could happen otherwise).


The Recipe 

• 2 or more UFO projects
• 2-3 yards of solid for background
• fat quarters that coordinate with the UFO's

Then I thought that, should this actually work, I'd want to be able to share with you what I did.  So I added directions.  

The Directions

• Rules are made to be broken.
• Cut/slice/chop or rip apart the UFO's into smaller squares (need not be perfectly square) 
• Add strips from the fat quarters to form an odd number of extempore blocks
• Connect the blocks with background fabric.
• Occasionally square up the blocks and add fabric as needed to fit them together into sections.  

An Example
These first photos are of a block I worked on for the quilt top I finished today.  As you can see I've added a cuts from different UFO's together to create one large block.  The black lines indicate the different sections.  Once I did, I noticed that the edges are not straight.

 I started trimming along the one long side, then rotated the block 1/4 turn and trimmed the next side.  The trick is to use the first cut to line up the next side so the block is square.  Continue until all four sides are square.  After squaring up this block, I added background fabric to connect several blocks together and continued working this way until I had a nice sized crib/lap quilt.

 And here it is.  There are five bow-tie blocks from one project, a windmill block left from my granddaughter's quilt, pieces of strips from another project and pieces of a couple of nine-patches from another.  In total I used leftovers or UFO's from four different projects.  Apparently having six granddaughters and several nieces means lots of pink quilts.  In fact, I have enough that I'm working on another fickle quilt in pink.  

Special thanks to my quilt top holder!  He's such a doll of a hubby!