FUO

Do you remember a few weeks ago when I posted this darling Market Bag that I made in Kate's class?  Well, I had intended to add some accessories to complete the set, and now I have.

These items are quilt in the hoop designs which you can find on Five Star Fonts.  They are a checkbook cover and a key ring that has a pocket on the back that snaps shut.  You can carry calling cards, credit cards, or a little mad money in it.

One FUO done. 

Oh, you don't know what that means?  Well, we are used to saying UFO for Unfinished Objects that we have lying around the house.  Although these two items weren't unfinished per se, the ensemble was.  But I switched the letters to stand for Follow Up On....  You see, assigning a category to a project, like Unfinished Object, implies that it will stay that way.  I mean, it has to if it wants to stay in your UFO box with all its friends, right?  It's a whole other ball of wax to be a Finished Object.  You don't get to hang out with all the other deadbeats, and you are usually displayed alone on a bed or a shoulder or a wall.  It gets loneseome out there all by yourself, so why would you want to change from being a UFO to anything else? You wouldn't, all because of your poor self image from being forgotten and left behind.

But suppose the fabric has a little more self respect than that.  Consider how it feels being a UFO -- here you've fondled and cut or torn and penciled and sewn on it -- all with the promise in the heat of the moment of good things to come.  But did you even call afterwards?  No!  You dumped it!  Pushed into a box in the closet or tossed into the back of one of your shelves.  You forever altered its pristine yardage, had your way with it and now it means nothing to you.  If this were a guy doing this to YOU, you'd think he was a cad.  And you'd have to make amends in a big way.

How?  Well, enter psychology.  If the project is now classified as FUO, it understands from the gitgo that its unfinished state is intended to be only temporary.  Following up on something implies an ongoing process -- that it will be brought back out into the sunlight and onto your eager sewing machine's table and stitched and tweaked and displayed proudly.  Kinda like when you won the spelling bee at school, and your mother took you all around the neighborhood to show her friends.  You did good.  You basked in the praise.  You felt loved.

So lets give all our UFO's a new life.  Let's live the promise we made to those fabrics and threads when we started out each new project.  Let's rename them FUO's and show them the love.  And most of all, let's let them out of the closet and FINISH them!