Good morning, my friends, and happy Saturday! It's a sunny day here at the Three Cats Ranch. The bird feeders are empty. From my window, I can see the birds tapping their little birdie feet waiting for the house occupant to come refill them. (It's hard for a bird to get good help these days.)
We ran a bunch of errands yesterday morning, including picking up the groceries that had accumulated on the list. It was a short list, and now we have enough food to get us through until week after next. I hate the idea of grocery shopping right before any holiday, including the Fourth of July. All those backyard barbecues, you know. We got home just before lunch time, and so it was well after noon before I was able to get into the sewing room.
As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I was tempted to clean off the whiteboard where I keep track of my projects and give it a fresh start. I was only partly serious, but my friend, Nancy, encouraged me to do it and say something about my method. So...what the heck? It needed doing, and so I did it. It took about an hour to get everything erased, cleaned, and re-written, but it's nice and clean and organized now...with straight lines. I'll tell you about it at the end of the post. First, I'll tell you about my sewing efforts that followed.
My top priority was to make a back for the Barnyard quilt. The fabric for that arrived the day before, and I needed to sew a single seam.
From there, I wanted to sew two more pieced blocks for the Girls' Getaway quilt. In addition to having 13 embroidered blocks, it also has 15 pieced blocks. As I work on my list of WIPs, I'm making two of the pieced blocks with each go-round. This time, I made two "Cake Stand" blocks. I did all the cutting and then sewed it all together. And...well...that ain't right.
Originally, I'd planned to serve it with some applesauce, but seeing melons in the grocery store made me want to make this Watermelon Salad with Rum and Mint. So in our wanderings yesterday, I picked up a watermelon. When I cut into it to make the salad, I was surprised to find it was a yellow watermelon! It tastes just like the red, but when you're expecting red and you get yellow, it's a little bit shocking.
Okay, so that covers my sewing and cooking adventures of yesterday. Next, I'll tell you about my whiteboard. And, honestly, you'll be forgiven if you'd rather slit your own throat than read on. For anyone who's interested, I'll tell you all about it. But that's all that's left for this post, so if you don't want to continue, please feel free to make your escape now. No hard feelings.
So my first stop was to give it a good cleaning. After being there for years, some of the ink was hard to wash off, but it all came off in the end. Windex worked well for this.
There were 11 sections before I erased everything. I had an idea for a 12th section, and so I used my rulers to make nice straight lines for 12 sections.
And then, I added back all the projects I'm presently working on.
Going through them section by section, the "To Quilt" section is self-explanatory. But a quilt doesn't go on this list until it's been sandwiched. When I have a quilt top and back ready for sandwiching, it gets moved to the "To Sandwich" list. Eventually, I'll sandwich all the quilts on that list, and then I'll simply erase and move the titles. "To Sandwich" will turn into "To Quilt," and vice versa.
Sections 3 and 4 are where I list small quilts. There are none on either list right now, and it's been a long time since any of these sections were empty. "Small" quilts are quilts small enough to quilt on my domestic machine.
Section 5 is my list of WIP's. These are pieced quilts. When this section comes up in my "flow," I work through the list in whatever increment makes sense. When Quilters Gather is being made one block at a time. When I start on Scrappy Plus, I'll work on one row at a time. If I'm planning to work on more than one block at a time, I'll indicate that. The red dot indicates the project I'm currently working on. I wouldn't mark these except it reminds me where I left off when we return home from traveling.
Finally, I have the "Quilter's Choice" section. These is the fun part of my work flow. I think of the other projects as my "meat and potatoes" projects. Sometimes I just want to do something quick and easy that I can work on from start to finish. These are the categories I choose from, and I check them off as I go so that I work on something for each category before starting over. They're not necessarily done in the order you see here. Since I just finished my "Vintage" art quilt, I'm checking that off. When I get to this section again, I'll do something else.
Regarding "Fun Finish Ideas," I have some lists of things I want to keep in the forefront of my feeble mind. The Quilter's Choice category called "Fun Finish," would be any project I can finish quickly, and I have some I'd like to do listed here.
The "New" section is for when I finish a project on my list of WIPs. This section includes patterns I want to start eventually. I have a lot more patterns than this...way more than I'll ever live long enough to finish...but these are the ones I'm most wanting to start next.
Finally, these are my hand embroidery projects. I keep them separate from the WIPs, but truthfully, that's what they are. The "Short" project is for small embroidery projects I can finish stitching in one go-round. It's kind of like the "Quilter's Choice" section, but for embroidery.
Okay, and when I started this whole thing, I mentioned my white board had grown and evolved. I started with this smaller white board. It got so crowded it was unworkable. So I began a larger white board. Now, I use this small one to keep track of the size of different quilts. Here's how it looked when I started all of this yesterday.
I cleaned it off and tidied it up some too. Once I've measured a finished quilt top, I don't want to have to measure it again. I keep track of the sizes here to help me know how many binding strips I need or how much fabric I need for a back. The right side of the board is for keeping track of temporary measurements when I'm working on something. How wide do I cut those strips? How big are those HST's? I can write it there and see it at a glance.
So there you go. A tour of my whiteboards. I'm happy to answer any questions. It's basically a to-do list, but it helps me feel as if I'm making progress when I'm moving things from one section to another. I'm the kind of person who will make up a to-do list and write down things I've already done so that I can cross them off. Any progress is good progress.
I've made and linked to the recipe before, but the link is no good any more. I couldn't find it anywhere online, and so I'll give it to you right here. It's a super simple and refreshing salad for a hot summer day, and my mint plants will produce more mint than I can use for the rest of my days.
Still here? Okay. So here we go. As a little intro, when I learned to quilt in 2008, I was making one quilt at a time and working on it until it was finished. Eventually, I realized that I got bored with just one project. By the time I got to the end, I was hurrying just to get it finished and move on to something else. Gradually, I started making more and more and more until I had so many projects going that a whole year might go by before any progress was made on a single project.
It was really unworkable, and so I put some of those projects on the "back burner" and only continued with them as I finished up the current projects. (Some of them, I quit altogether.) Eventually, I got my list back down to a manageable size (for me...five projects on my WIPs list). It's "manageable" because each project gets a little work done every month or so. Also, I can quickly pick up a given project and continue on without having to reorient myself to what I'm doing. Also, enough time passes between that each project feels "fresh" each time I work on it.
Over time, my whiteboard has grown larger (more on that in a minute), and it has evolved. So, here's where I started yesterday. You can see it's kind of messy. There are also a lot of ink "crumbs" from repeated erasures. The alligator clips at the top allow me to put up a poster board there when I work on projects done in the Ruth McDowell way. If I'm very careful, I can do that without erasing anything. Also, sorry about some of the reflections in these photos. I had the flash turned off, but the lighting in the room created some glare I couldn't avoid.
When I've finished all the blocks for a particular project, it goes to the "Quilt Tops to Finish" section. I used to do these in the order they went on the list, but now I do the oldest project first. The red dots indicate their order. I use dots rather than numbers because it's easy enough to erase a dot with my finger or add a dot if some new entry cuts in line ahead of the others. Joyful Journey will be next, Homestead next, and so on.
The monthlies are just what they sound like...BOMs. My Rainbow Scrap projects generally end up listed here, and I'll work on these at the beginning of each month, or when the new block is released.
"Panels" is the new section I added. I have Panel quilts listed in the Quilter's Choice section, and I've listed all the panels I have in my stash. I don't usually buy panels, and most of these have been given to me as gifts.
Okay. The foot-tapping birdies have probably waited long enough. I'll fill their feeders and then I'll get back to my slow-stitching. I didn't get to work on it yesterday, so I'll give myself extra time today.
9 comments:
Organizing is what you do before you do something, so that when you do it, it is not all mixed up. ~ A. A. Milne
Oh Thank you! That must have been a pain to do but I have to say I love the idea of the white board. Your nice clean board looks great! I also get bored with working on one quilt but often lose track of what I have in my wip. The keeping it to 5 is a great idea. I can see that I might need a section for deadline quilts. The list of already measured quilt sizes would be great to have also. How many times do I measure twice or three times? Efficiency is not my strong suit. I have learned (the hard way) to add a note to my wip before I set something aside. But there have been times when I wasn’t planning on setting it aside and when I come back to it I have to figure out where I am in the project. One more reason to limit the list to 5. I think I remember when you were attempting to work down your wip pile. You had more than 5.
Thank you for sharing your organizing method - it's very interesting. I use a little spiral bound notebook with a page for each project, but I don't have as much detail as you. I write down measurements and such to help me remember as I go. My wall space is small, but I may start something similar to your white board to keep track of all the ongoing projects. And the suggestion of only 5 projects at a time is something to strive for!
Also, thanks for the chicken salad recipe - I'm going to give it a try. I love reading about your cooking adventures, too, as I like to try new low fat recipes.
That backing fabric for the barnyard quilt is really cute, it's going to be a fun finish. It was interesting to see your organization process for your projects. I use an Excel spreadsheet to track my projects and progress. I have a notebook where I keep up with the finished sizes of the quilt tops because you definitely don't want to have to measure again before you cut for the backing. Have a wonderful Sunday.
I'm thinking a whiteboard will really help me get organized - a visual reminder - and get things completed. The scary part will be listing all of my unfinished projects!
A yellow watermelon. Why? Really. Never knew such a thing.
Some one does need to focus on seedless strawberries so that people like Mike and I can enjoy them.
The white board thing is a good thing. I just have way too many projects to begin with. I mean, it's waay more funner to start a new project, than to finish the five I started last week. (Lopsided grin)
Thank you for explaining your white board system. I have been following along for awhile and this answers some questions and gives me ideas for my own organizing!
My computer hiccuped and I think I did a comment but then again maybe it's floating around in the ether. It was one of my better ones too....sigh.
I had no idea there was such a thing as yellow watermelon! At first, I thought it was mango. That is a clever way to keep track of your quilt projects, having it right in front of you at a glance!
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