Giving in to practicality...

This past weekend while rummaging through my stash, I pulled out this adorable "Sultry" jelly roll I bought on vacation last summer. I set it on my sewing table to just look at it in all its pink and greeny goodness, and my mind started racing at the possibilities it held for a new project.

"Jelly Roll at Bedside." Can you tell I'm into non-fiction this summer?

It's a weird feeling to describe, but I'm sure you know it -- there's a lightness, and excitement as those ideas start flowing, rising like bubbles in a champagne glass. Pencil hits paper, sketches take shape, and in your head you envision the cutting, piecing, the backing, the perfect (or near-perfect, in my case) quilting on it, and see the final product fresh from the dryer, or maybe even being unwrapped to oohs and aahs by its recipient on Christmas morning.

The whole experience leaves you a little giddy, tipsy on creative juice -- and slightly out of touch with reality.

You think "If I start cutting right now, I can crank the top out this afternoon, baste it tomorrow and have it bound by next Tuesday!" And in a perfect world, you might. But those creative juices blind you to the 57 other things you need to do by next Tuesday, and you lose total sight of the project in progress and any other impediments to successful completion, like work and laundry and weedy gardens.

Sound familiar?

I was about twenty minutes into sketching what might have been the greatest quilt ever when the juice wore off and I began to mentally slap myself around a little for even entertaining the thought of starting something new. Who am I kidding? Don't I already have enough on my plate? Don't I have a whole mess of unfinished projects that need attention? Am I going to let the UFO's take over or am I going to try to finish some of them for once?

I hate it when my practical self surfaces and sounds an awful lot like my mother.

Alas, Practical Self was right. I really didn't need to start something new with so much unfinished. Big sigh.

So I closed my sketchbook and calmly, regretfully placed those cute, girly pink fabrics back in the bin they came out of and turned to my UFO pile to work on something from there instead. I narrowed it down to three projects in varying stages of completion, and then chose the one that held the most promise that it might actually become a finished quilt.

This bundle of strips held the most appeal. It was also the easiest of the three choices, so there's a good chance of success.

Don't worry, I'll come back to that jelly roll someday. I just need to do this to get Practical Self off my back for a while.

But I gotta tell you, this isn't helping my motivation very much: