Rediscovering UFOs 11-16-19

I have temporarily moved my sewing machine table into the family room to take advantage of a medium sized table I can back the machine table up to so I can work on a larger quilt than I usually make.  Normally the machine table backs up to the dining table, but it is so piled with stuff I can't work on a quilt there.  It has worked well with some slight shifting of my recliner and KoKo's chair.   

And it gave me access to a couple plastic boxes of stuff under the dining table that I can't get to with the machine table in place.  So, I pulled those boxes out and discovered some ancient UFOs.  Oh, my goodness, some of them I just vaguely remember.  And many are partially hand quilted.  I haven't been able to hand quilt for several decades, since the arthritis in my hands got worse and worse.   I have no memory of why I stopped working on any of them, except a few from classes that didn't engage me very much.  I don't know what I will do with most of them, but I do remember this one and will probably finish it with machine quilting.  A friendship group I belonged to at the time did a project where everyone brought a paper bag with a certain number of cut squares (1-3/4").  Looks like the color choices were red, beige, blue, and green, but I don't remember how those were chosen.  Then we put the bags around a table and everyone went around and took a certain number of squares from each bag.  At least that is how I remember it.  For some reason they were called Laundry Room quilts - maybe because if they turned out badly they could hang in the laundry room where nobody else could see them.  We were to sew them together into a quilt adding whatever we wanted to add.  I was very much into spiky borders then and sewed many by hand as a carry-around project.  Here is "Red Bird's Quilt" from 1991!!!!

"Red Bird's Quilt"  Del Thomas August 1991

21.5W x 23.75L

Cotton & metallic fabrics, cotton batt, cotton thread.

Machine and hand pieced, hand applique, pen work,

machine and hand quilted.

This is the only spike that is quilted and it is out of align. 

Red bird on the back, a 13.5" block.  I paper cut this bird and used her in a number of different applications. 

Here is the label written right on the back right corner. 

This really takes me back in time when I was much more productive than I am now.  Gosh, 28 years ago. 

I will look deeper into the box when I have more time. 

Who knows what treasures I might find?

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