HUGE January Finishes……

What a start to the year ladies!!!!   You are truly ay-may-zing……and so inspiring…….Dawn and I nearly lost our breath as we counted up our finishes for last month……..

SIXTY-TWO altogether

…..that’s incredible, considering last year’s entire total was 228….

You girls have managed to accomplish more than 1/4 of all last year’s finishes in only one month!!!!    Holy Guacamole!!!!!!!  Incredible!  What are we going to achieve THIS month???!!!!  The sky’s the limit, I say! I can hardly wait to see!

For those of you who are kicking themselves under the table now for not quite making January’s deadline for the first surprise we promised you, Dawn and I have been discussing how we really didn’t give you much time to plan a finish so……….any finishers in February will qualify for both January and February’s blocks which we talked about here.

Maria’s given us a sneak preview of the ‘gift block’ all finishers received for January….how slick is she!!!….. now, you really have no excuses…..and seeing as it’s a leap year this year, you still have 27 days to get at least one UFO completed!  Whaddya say????

As Dawn and I added up the totals, we thought we might just touch on a few housekeeping matters just to clarify……

*  A ‘’finish’, in Sew It’s Finished terms, must be a completed UFO from your pile of UNFINISHED OBJECTS…..this can be small, big, individual, a pair or a set, but they must be from the depths of your cupboards and have been sitting there for more than a couple of months (before Dec 31, 2011) and are annoying the irrits out of you because they’re still UFO’s!!!!   After all, that’s what our blog is all about!!!

*’Completed” means just that……it has to be completed…finished, terminado, cesado, accompli, finito!  Nothing left to be done to it but used/gifted/hung/shared…..you get the idea!

*Posting – When you post about your finish, could you please indicate within the post  which finish it is, when the item was started (can be approximate if it’s been faaaaar too long!),  what you needed to do to finish it, whether it was just the binding, sew a button on, quilt it, etc and finish with your name.  Just be aware that we now have 100 members, and some of you do share the same name so poor ol’ Dawn and I get so confused!!!!!   If you share your name with another member (you can check the finishers’ list on the right hand sidebar), can you add the first initial of your surname as well please???  That way, we won’t do our heads in quite as much as we normally do! LOL

* Labels - you’ve probably noticed the cloud of labels in our right hand side bar and wondered why on earth we have so many and what do they do??   Well, when we are looking for something in particular, say… how many finishes Dawn has done…..we can click on the word ‘Dawn’, and every post that is labelled ‘Dawn’ will be listed!   If you haven’t labelled your posts, finding info quickly is just not going to happen!   Soooooo. when you write your post, it’s important you add labels to the end.

How you might ask?????…  Once you’ve written your post, over on the right hand side of Blogger, there is a list of ‘Post Settings’….the first one is, you guessed it, “LABELS”.  Click on ‘labels’ and it will open up with a box you can type in,  plus a list of labels that have already been generated.  Your labels' for each post MUST include…

1 your name,

2 your blog name …..and….

3 which finish it is…..we’d love you to put both your overall finishes (12th finish) and this year’s finishes ( 1st finish 2012) 

You can either type them in, in which case, if they’re already in the label list, they’ll come up in a dropdown box which you can click on;  you can click on the existing labels listed, or you can just type in one that summarises your post…eg.  embroidery, stitchery, piecing, Dawn Hay Designs, etc.  You’ll get some ideas from looking through the existing labels if you’re not sure….don’t be afraid……you won’t get it wrong, and you definitely won’t be sacked!!!!! LOL

*Full House – we do have a full house at this moment…..100 bloggers have joined our ‘little’ group to commit to attacking their pile of UFO’s and make way for some new ones!   We do have people wishing to join, but Blogger will only allow us a maximum of 100 so, with this in mind, we would ask that if you feel you are no longer interested, or if  life circumstances just won’t allow you to put UFO’s high on your priority list at this point in time, could you let us know by dropping us a quick email?  We certainly won’t be offended , we’ll  understand completely and that will allow those who are waiting patiently in the wings a chance to join in and benefit from your collective enthusiasm.  If circumstances change and you’d like to rejoin, you are always more than welcome!!!!

And talking about welcoming………A HUGE big welcome to all our members……we’ve had a few changes since Christmas with a few leave the group and a few more join so we’d just like to say, we love having you with us……the encouragement is overwhelming and we’re so happy  you’ve chosen to DELVE into your UFO piles with us, with the goal of not SHELVE–ing too many new ones in two thousand and TWELVE!!!!!  (ewwww…it’s not getting any better with time, is it??? LOL)

Sew many hugs

xo Wendy and Dawn :O)