A Parable of Two Projects

Or how I made four things out of one (all divagations in the footnotes)

Let me first start by saying this set of events would not have happened years ago when quilting and knitting were how I escaped from the demands of working and going to night school. There was so much reading between work and school that even the most engaging novels felt like an assignment—except when we were camping in the summer. My motto there was, “A book a day, a movie (at a cinema or drive-in) a night.” Happily, even if we had cellphones, the reception at Nickerson State Park was so bad that we had to leave the campground and go into town to check our voicemail and email at a coffee shop.¹

Back then, if I blundered in my project it got binned—not thrown away, just literally put in a UFO bin (UnFinished Objects).

Fast forward twenty or so years and unfinished objects are now getting finished and blundered projects, like my recent “almost done but didn’t fit” cardigan,² get deconstructed and fixed or started over from scratch. The feeling I get is one of deep satisfaction because I am realizing that a finish feels only as good as the attention and devotion the project is given.

Before, knitting and quilting were ways to distract myself or escape for a bit. The outcome wasn’t as important as was the break it gave me to “get out of my head and into my hands.”³ Now that I’m in my three score and ten decade I’m “working” for the pleasure of seeing my garden grow and knitting and quilting for the art and craft of it. The outcome has shifted to creating something worthy of the time I am giving it. That is such a huge distinction—a critical shift had happened in how I approach everything now.

So, here is the blunder that made me aware of this profound change.

2026 has been my “year of quilts”—there have been a few knitting and gardening projects but the majority of my efforts have gone into seven new quilts (so far). Two are baby quilts… and one of those almost got UFO binned. It was a Flying Geese baby quilt and I was happily working away with the hand stitching part. A Celtic artist friend who was staying for a few nights was asking about how a quilt gets made, so I took the quilt off my lap hoop to show him the “quilt sandwich” of top-batting-backing when I saw my humungous blunder! I had the backing on the WRONG SIDE. I was stunned. I had never done that before. I was crushed… I was very nearly done all the hand quilting. I just couldn’t think what to do so I folded it and put it aside until the next day.

In talking it over later with my family members, we came to the conclusion that I could recycle it into four pillows for my son and his wife. I’d figure out how to do that later—it could wait to be a Christmas present. In the meantime, I would make another baby quilt… and I did.⁴

Fast forward to this past week when I decided I needed to tackle the somewhat intimidating task of upgrading my workhorse computer (a 2015 27” iMac). This is usually not a difficult task but the operating system I needed was not something I could simply acquire through Apple. My computer was too old. But it is still working beautifully. I decided to go the OpenCore Legacy route. I had backed up everything and I had the foresight to move my iMovie project library to a portable hard drive.⁵

The process of downloading, reformatting, uploading and testing means there’s a lot of waiting around for each step. The failed Flying Geese quilt was just the kind of thing I could pick up and put down while I moved through the steps required by my computer’s upgrade.

Recycling by cutting the existing quilt into four pillows would be a shortcut and not an elegant solution. The Flying Geese blocks would lose their points and the finished product would look terrible. In addition, the backing was a cute fabric and it would be a shame not to salvage it and use it for something else.

I unpicked the whole thing and then unpicked the seams that quartered the blocks leaving me with four 16.5” blocks. I found some plain white fabric and cut four new backings. And then I asked my son and his wife what they would like for the back of the pillows.

This is where it got to be fun! They came by and we looked at all the options… solids, printed fabric, batiks… pulling stuff out of my stash bins and waiting for the ZING! of the perfect match. And then we found it—a Windham Fabric piece called “Twilight” that I bought yards of just because I thought it was beautiful. I’m happy with what I’m doing now—not a make-do recycle but an honest creation of something lovely and useful. The one “blundered” baby quilt was the chrysalis and these four pillows are the butterflies.

Blundered quilt—four quarters—pillow tops with border—pillow back fabric

When these pillows are all done, I’ll add a photo of them to my “Year of Quilts” post later this year because I might have a few more other quilts done by then. My list of quilts I’d like to do is long… it never gets shorter.

1. The art house Cape Cinema in Dennis had its audience pegged… movies changed every two or three nights and reappeared the following week or so. You could see at least five films there in a two week stay, or at least, that’s my recollection. It was also a very cool place to watch a movie with its gorgeous ceiling painted by Rockwell Kent and seats with their removable linen covers.

2. “Tabouli” designed by Carol Feller, knitted in Nua, color “Frog on the Wall”. https://stolenstitches.com/products/tabouli-cardigan

3. Favorite saying of Kate Jackson (not the actress) of The Last Homely House fame… along with, “How hard could it be?”

4.

5. I should have first checked that Mercury was not retrograde. Everything seemed to be okay but wasn’t. Things went from bad to worse. I contacted the Waterford Computer Clinic and that will be my first stop on Monday morning. I will, hopefully, have a better machine but it won’t be useful to me for several days. Oh well… more quilting. It’s a good thing I have a laptop… although editing videos on this 15 inch screen isn’t as much fun as having 27 inches of space.