Most advice about unfinished projects is about finishing them. Karen Brown spends half of this one helping you let them go.
It helps that she draws the line narrowly. A UFO, to her, is something you set aside, have not touched in over a year, and have no current plan to finish. A quilt you are working through slowly, even one that has three more years in it, is a work in progress and does not count. That line alone lifts a lot of projects off the pile before you have opened a single bag.
She also disagrees with the method everyone else recommends. Pulling every project into a heap in the middle of the room burns the energy you need for the sewing, and most people quit before they make anything. She takes two or three at a time instead. For each one she reads the pattern again, works out how much is actually done, and prices what is still missing, batting and backing included. She thought one of hers was half built and found it was not quite a fifth. Then she asks why it stopped, because the answer is nearly always the same one: something went wrong, and going forward means going backward first.
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Then she gets to the maybe pile, and this is the part to stay for. She works it with questions that get smaller each time. Is there someone in your life who needs a quilt? Would the blocks you already have sit well in a plain grid with a lot of space around them? Would they make a baby quilt instead, or a table runner, or a pillow? Could you ask two friends for a block each? And when none of that moves you, she says the thing most quilting videos will not. The money went years ago and it is not coming back, and you cannot be held to a decision you made when you knew less. "If you're waiting for someone to give you permission to stop, I'm giving it to you now."
If you want ours, with the sorting written out and what to do with the blocks you rescue, we wrote it here: UFOs and WIPs, how to finish the sewing projects you started.
Karen's channel is Just Get it Done Quilts.
