welcome to the QB. quilts take as long as they take. whatever makes it a good journey for you.

drop it like a hot potato. Life is too short. The only rule is : if the fabric appears ugly, it is because you did not cut it into small enough pieces.

There is one thing I've always told my beginning quilting students.....many, many renown creators have left work unfinished:
Shubert and Mozart, Mark Twain, Hemingway, and Chaucer, even DaVinci and Michelangelo! You would be in good company if you walked away, so to do or not to do, that is your question alone.:)
Sometimes, even though your quilt is not finished, you are finished with your quilt. It's okay.:thumbup:

Jan in VA

Had to chuckle reading your post... Wanting to start something else before we finish the previous thing is a VERY common phenomenon. We call it Quilter's A.D.D. So many of us have succumbed to it, probably because we get so many new ideas before finishing what we are working on.

If you are bored with your first quilt and anxious to start something else, why don't you machine quilt it? You can do simple straight lines or a criss cross grid with a walking foot. That would get it done, at least, so you could move on to something more interesting.

OR... do as we all do and just set it aside for later. The Quilting Police will NOT come to your house and arrest you if you don't finish. :D

I just had nine quilts going at the same time. I am now working to finish up the ninth. I should have it finished by the weekend. Normally I totally finish one before starting another. This time I was working with a huge bunch of scraps. Lately I have been making kids quilts to donate.

Welcome to the board, lots of helpful people here.

I just finished a top that I really didn't like. There was no satisfaction in it, and I didn't even like putting it on the shelf with the others. I hope this will help me let go if this happens again. I think the difficulty I had was that I'd put so much time into it, it seemed like a waste of that time to leave it unfinished. But now I realize that finishing it just wasted additional time beyond what I'd already invested. It reminded me of a rule my Dad taught me about poker -- never throw good money after bad, (meaning, once you realize you have a bad hand, don't keep betting on it).

I've always got more than one project in the works. I did a sampler quilt and I mean "totally sampler". It was hand-pieced, machine pieced and hand quilted and machine quilted. It had paper-piecing and embroidery. It had big-stitching and smaller stitching. Had a mix of batting. Some of the ugliest fabric and the prettiest fabric. It was a totally scrappy even the backing. I used a few different stitches depending on what machine I was using or hand stitching. It was my quilt and now belongs to a little girl who just fell in love with it. It gave me a break and that is what I often refer to it; the break-away. I have another kind of sort of in pieces. I also had some embellishments on it. I guess you could call it a crazy sampler but they were actual blocks.

If I am uninspired while working on something, I have no problem putting it aside and working on something else. There are times when I lack concentration but still want to quilt, so I pick uncomplicated patterns and that seems to put me in a better frame of mind. It makes me feel like I've accomplished something, even if it was just a simple quilt or small project.

My first quilt took me 14 years to finish. It was started before rotary cutters were invented and we had to draw cardboard templates and use scissors to cut the pieces. Then the hand quilting also took a long time, partly because I used cotton/polyester fabric and it was harder to get the needle through. After that, I made one quilt a year for a long time because I was hand quilting. Eventually, I started sending larger quilts out to long armers and machine quilting my own. Such is a quilter's journey. Do what you enjoy and avoid what you don't!

Thank you, to everyone!! My hubbz is ok, he had an infection that settled in his heart and once he was hospitalized for that, a piece broke off causing an aneurysm in his brain. It was a long year. He will need valve replacement every 5-7 years now, but other than that it's like it never happened.

Thanks for the great perspective on this project!! I think the hard part for me is I have already spent so much time on it and I am really not a patient person, haha!! I am hoping to get a machine by the end of the year. This is the first thing I have ever sewn and didn't want to invest until I knew I liked it. We have a cool place here that offers a studio space with machines to use for $12/hr so I will probably go check it out and learn to machine sew before I buy one.

I am a relatively young person and I think part of the draw of hand quilting is that it's sort of become a "lost art" and is there really anything as beautiful as a quilt done by hand? I am the same way when it comes to cooking...I do everything from scratch, including baking my own bread. There's just a satisfaction in doing things the old-fashioned way. I might start looking for the pattern for my next quilt and getting the fabrics together while I slowly finish this one. Maybe it'll motivate me to complete this one faster. I just want to do at least one completely by hand. :)