Monthly Archives: January 2023

Top 5 Excuses for Projects I Won’t Finish

Quilters, sewists and crafters alike all suffer from an abundance of unfinished projects. We feel really guilty about it and struggle against it as if it were a rip tide, often to no avail. The causes of the stacks of uncut fabric and the bags of partially sewn treasures are many.  Here are the:

Top 5 Excuses for Projects I Won’t Finish

  1. It’s too difficult – As an accomplished seamstress who has been sewing long before prom dresses had poofy sleeves, you will never hear me use this excuse. For me, no project is too difficult, so I’ll have to move on to one of our other excuses.
  2. It went out of fashion – I know this excuse sounds hard to believe, but it happens more than you might think. Back in college, my sewing bestie and I decided to make sexy knit dresses that were basically a tube dress with a wide off the shoulder band. We trekked down to Boston’s Chinatown, where all the good fabrics stores used to be, and bought bright 80’s knitted prints for what we were calling our “She-Woman” dresses. Neither of us started sewing the dresses for several years. In our defense, we were both undergraduates at M.I.T. and thus were kinda busy. My friend eventually made her dress, but I never did. At least two decades passed, both the dress pattern and the print became hopelessly out of date, and I ended up giving the fabric away.
  3. I ran out of fabric – Running out of fabric is a very good excuse for not finishing a project. Sometimes, this excuse can be mitigated by searching online for just a little bit more of the fabric in question. Both eBay and ETSY are great places to start. You can even use Google reverse image search to find a matching swatch!
  4. I don’t have time – This is both a common and very sad reason for not finishing a project. After sewing for decades and always having a heinously demanding day job, my best advice to ameliorate this unfortunate condition is to make sewing a priority. Don’t wait for the dishes to be done and the laundry sorted before you will allow yourself sewing time! Sew first, do household chores later.
  5. Shiny! Shiny-object syndrome is quite assuredly the number one reason I continue to stockpile unfinished projects. Something pretty and distracting (i.e., “shiny”) will pop up on my Instagram feed and I simply must make it as soon as possible. I always tell myself, “I won’t start a new project until I finish something I’m currently working on”. Predictably, this never works. My best recommendation for combatting this syndrome is to get together with your other sewing friends and have a “finish it up” challenge whereby all participants agree to complete one UFO (un-finished object) by a specified date. You can then move on to the new project with slightly less guilt!

Finding Quilting Inspirations… in Magazines!

When you think of where quilters are most likely to find inspiration you might immediately think of online resources, such as Instagram, Pinterest and a wide variety of quilting blogs. But did you know that 85% of “dedicated quilters” look for inspiration and information about quilt making from magazines? According to the Quilting in America™ 2017* survey, a Dedicated Quilter is one who spends $500 or more per year on the hobby, including books, magazines, fabric, tools, supplies, etc. The survey also revealed these other fun facts about Dedicated Quilters and their magazines:

  • Dedicated Quilters have spent an average of $136 on books, magazines, and DVDs in the past 12 months.
  • They read an average of 3.4 magazines regularly and spend an average of 6 hours a month reading quilting-related magazines.
  • The top reasons they read magazines is to learn new tips and techniques (88%), get quilt making inspiration (75%), find out about quilting products (63%), look at photos of quilts (62%), and find block patterns (60%).

I personally enjoy reading a lot of quilting magazines, both the grocery store variety and the high end, specialty magazines. To me, the appeal of magazines are many: no glaring “screen time” and no hunching over a computer; magazines are battery-free and can be enjoyed anywhere, from a couch, pool or airplane to an office building while you are  you are stuck waiting for a boring appointment; you can cut out images for a vision board; you can cut out pictures and file away patterns for a later date, in your “someday I’ll have time to make this” pile; and finally, they are made by industry design professionals so they are very pretty and enjoyable to just sit back and absorb.

The next time you are looking for quilting inspiration, education, or simply relaxation, pick up a magazine or two!

*Presented by The Quilting Company brands: Fons & Porter, McCall’s Quilting, Quilters Newsletter, Quiltmaker, and Quilting Arts in cooperation with Quilts, Inc., producers of International Quilt Market & International Quilt Festival.