Saving a UFO

As I indicated in my previous post, I'm participating in the Quilting in Murder - Save a UFO initiative.  This is the story of my UFO.

Back around the turn of the millenium, when my entire quilting e-world was in the form of AOL forums, I participated in a block swap.  We were each to make a Jacob's Ladder block in reds and whites.  At first I thought I organized it is because the Jacob's Ladder is a part of my sorority tradition, and cardinal red is our sorority's color, but as I dug through the box, I found the original instructions dated August, 2001 (due November, 2001), and I wasn't the host.  I loved the blocks I got in return and to this day they sit in a nice little box all stacked in a pile, complete with the names and email addresses of the quilters who made them still attached.  A quilting template in the form of a sheaf of wheat (another sorority symbol) is tucked in there with them.

This photo shows six of the blocks on my cutting table.  There are 54 of them in all, however, some of them are not to the 9.5" unfinished dimension specified by the swap and won't be used.  Many of them still have the labels attached with the information about the quilters who sent them ... with email address domains like earthlink and webtv!  I wonder how many of them are out there in the blogosphere now?  Also in the box, printed out in July, 2001 (a week after my now 11-year-old son had his first birthday), is a copy of the original instructions from Quilter's Cache, which you can still find here, although this finishes at 12" square, not 9".

A few times I have opened the box, laid the blocks out on the floor, moved them around ... and put them all back.  I could have put them together into a top but the dilemma of a border still remained.  Since then I've decided to do a red and white flying geese border but haven't made any headway on actually doing it.

My commitment now is to finish the top and maybe even get it sandwiched and quilted.  Let's see how far I get.  I think a decade is long enough to keep a UFO on the shelf with the intention of getting it finished someday.