Scraps Saturdays

I save nearly all of my fabric scraps from sewing, quilting and texile art projects so I can reuse them. Often I do as patchwork for crazy quilt projects or stitch practice pieces. This is the bag in my sewing room that holds them.

Here's a sample of what's in the bag: the trimmed legs from a pair of thrifted capris I altered into shorts, some fabric trimmed from some backing, a piece of cross stitch fabric leftover from framing the thrifted Santa piece, and a short length of ribbon, also from Christmas.

Once my scrap bag is full I empty it into my scraps bin here. If you think having an entire bin of scraps is a bit much, keep in mind that I gave away two other bins of scrap fabric I had saved last year to the local quilting guild. :)

Here's my problem: the scraps bin is full now, and I either have to start another bin, or devote more time to using up my scraps. Since I'm still trying not to hoard fabric, I'm going to take one night a week to use scraps only to make some small projects. I have the most time on Saturday nights, so that's when I'll work on this project. I might also start making some crumb quilting blocks for a quilt.

Here's what I made on my first scraps Saturday: two embroidered cup sleeves and a mug rug for my home office desk. I feel like I'm off to a good start.

Comments

Love Means This

Invested in a couple of hand-dyed bundles from one of my favorite fabric artists. This one said "Make me into something for Valentine's Day." So I went for a quilted and embellished tote. I kept thinking about what love means to me as I worked on it. Here's the finished tote. Although I was tempted to embellish with beads and pins, I got sick and only felt well enough to do a little stitching every night. As I worked I thought about how often love seems disappointing to us, especially when it fails to live up to our expectations. But now that I've experienced love in many forms, I can say that it's made me a better person than I might have been without it. Love is a precious thing, and should be appreciated in all its forms. I am very grateful for the love of my guy, my child and my friends who have stuck with me all these years. That's you two, in case you're wondering. :) Also finally found something to do with a ve...

Other Stashes

Along with clearing out the spare bedroom and tidying my office and our guest bedroom, I decided to reorganize some of my stashes. This is all the yarn I have on hand, sorted by color. It looks like a lot, but lately I've been using up a minimum of half a bin every month, so this is approximately a year's supply. All of my solid color cotton perle thread. I go through a lot of this every year, too. I need a container in which I can fit all of it together, but I haven't found the right one yet. I won't show you all of my fabric -- I'm still reorganizing this stash -- but I went through everything and donated two bins of fabric I won't need to the local quilter's guild.

Store Closing Haul

The mega Books-A-Million store over in Sanford is closing, and offered an extra 20% off on their current stock -- all sales final -- so I went over to do some shopping. Safely but sadly there was no one in the store but me the entire time I was there. The Holly Jackson novel is for Katherine, the Halloween board book is for Oliver, and the copy of Garden Spells is to keep on hand because I give that book to everyone. The rest of the books are for me. I love Anne Cleeves, and the Galbraith novel sounded interesting (the first couple weren't, but I'm willing to take another chance.) The Escape Room is by a new-to-me author, plus it was cheap. The GreenCraft mag is just a guilty pleasure. Hopefully the smaller BAM nearer to me won't close. I don't buy many books from brick-and-mortar stores these days, but that's really the last one within reasonable driving distance.

Valerean

Search This Blog