Where have all the quilts gone?

I am trying to keep abreast of the Block Lotto Weekend Update  ?themes?assignments?, but it is really hard! Okay, not my children are starving to death & my husband is out of work hard but still not easy.  This is no reflection on Block Lotto, but more a reflection on me.  I don't really have an assigned kind of mind.

This week, this month actually, as there is only one "assignment" a month (did my difficulty just get sadder?):  Where do your quilts go?  My quilts are a lot like the old joke about last call:  You don't have to go home but you can't stay here.   Because when I am done I am done.  Also my house is small & crowded enough as it is, so if I am not working on it & cannot use it out the door it goes.  I wish I could say the same thing about shoes.   Or books.  Or dogs (although I am still using them, in a completely not creepy or food-based way). 

Wow, this post is going hopelessly astray!  Let me start again- where DO the quilts go?  Mostly they go as gifts to people to whom I would otherwise give a gift of some other kind.  I am always a little bit freaked when someone talks about making a donation to a person going through chemo & it turns out that person is their brother-in-law.  In my book that does not quite fall under the heading of donation.  I am not saying it isn't generous.  I, too, gave a quilt to a neighbor of mine going through chemo but I don't consider it charity.  Actually, it was more payback for all the stuff she has done for me (she mowed my pasture without being asked, just opened the gate & mowed it.  I was so happy I almost cried.  & then she did it again & again & again) & the quilt was in the works before she was diagnosed (in an everything loops back to the beginning way, the quilt was completely lifted from a Block Lotto pattern which did not register until I was putting the finishing touches on this post; despite all appearances to the contrary I occasionally use spell-check). 

So mostly the quilts I make go as gifts to people I know.  The next big block (no pun intended) of quilts really does go to pay some karmic debt that was not incurred in this life (like paying back a pasture mower which is incurred in this life, every summer).  I have made quilts for auctions & raffles to raise funds for causes I believe in.  I have made quilts at a shelter for the use of the residents, both to cover themselves & to teach them a technique (one of the favorites to make & to give away is the foundation free string quilt). 

There are a few (a very few) quilts sitting on a shelf waiting to become one or the other of these.  They tend to be quilts I made while working something out; like a potential block swap pattern.  They are rarely personal enough to use as gifts, unless it is a gif to someone I don't know all that well (A's grad students went through a fecund period a few years ago & it was nice to have some potential baby gifts on the shelf.  Fortunately physics grad students aren't like so many other fields where you really can fit in a family life so I rarely make more than one baby quilt every two-three years). 

The last big pile of quilts are those that are not quilts yet. Because I hate to baste.  I hate to baste so much I have ELEVEN quilt tops, with backs pieced & bindings pressed ready to go if I would just baste them.  But I hate basting.  & yes, I am getting to the baste or die point in my sewing room because there is quite literally no more room for one more completed top + accoutrements on the almost done shelf.

Finally:  number of completed quilts I have kept for myself:  none.  There is one in the tv room made especially for my husband & one in the dining room he puled from the giveaway pile, so I think of those as his.  The quilt on our bed came from Bed, Bath & Beyond.