Of a sort, anyway.
My mom passed away in the spring of 2009. Every Christmas since then, I've intended to put together a photo book of all the photos I have of Mom's quilts and send one to each of my sibs (four in all) as a Christmas gift. And every Christmas it hasn't gotten done. This has been something hanging over me for several years now. I didn't list it as one of my "Quilted Monkeys on My Back" for 2014, but it was definitely there.
As I've been playing around with LifeTopix and setting up my projects for the year, I created one project labeled "Quilt Documentation." One of the tasks in that project was to, once and for all, get that photo book put together. Regardless of it now being mid-January, since I had Monday off as a comp day (to balance being out of town for work last weekend), I sat down to organize those photos of Mom's quilts, put them into a photo book, and send them out to my siblings as a belated Christmas gift.
After monkeying around with it for about an hour and a half, I came to the conclusion that it wouldn't work. Set aside that none of us has a complete collection of photos of Mom's quilts to work with; set aside that Mom herself was really bad at documenting her own quilts (so even those we do have photos of in her albums are often unlabeled so I'm guessing at dates based on color schemes and fabrics).... The main problem is the quality of the photos is often so poor that if I put them in print in a book, they'd be pretty useless. It just doesn't make sense to spend money having a photo book printed when half the photos would be blurry, pixellated, or discolored.
I finally sent my sibs a link to an online photo album of the photos with an explanation, my apologies, and hopes that they'd enjoy the photos anyway. And I made myself check that task as "done," a quilted monkey off my back, even if it wasn't completed the way I'd have liked it to be.
To be honest, by the time I'd decided it was unlikely to work but still kept poking away at it anyway, I began to get the feeling Mom was standing behind me, tut-tutting and tapping her foot with impatience, saying, "Get over it already, and get back to your own quilting. I can't wait to see how your Rapid Fire Hunter's Star turns out! You know I'd have bought that ruler the minute I saw it, so finish it already, for both of us!"
Lesson learned. The other two tasks on that Quilt Documentation project list are to organize the photos of my own quilts in my digital files, which I've been poking away at regularly over the last couple of weeks, and to create photo books documenting my quilts now, so my kids will already have them in hand when that day comes. Not that I'll tell them that. They get creeped out when I talk about doing things in preparation for when I'm no longer with them. I'll just leave them on a shelf to be found....
Done. Check. Moving on...