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Le Scraps Bag

Here's a chore that I do a couple times of year (or I used to, anyway): cleaning out the scraps bag I keep in the sewing room. This time it's overflowing because I've been procrastinating, and there's literally no room left in it for anything else.

Pulling out all the scraps and sorting them is like a trip back through time; I get to see snips and trimmings from all my projects. As I did I began seeing scraps from projects I did last year, and checked my journal. Sure enough, I haven't cleaned out the scrap bag since September 2025. This also made me realize how little I've been sewing over the last 13 months.

Back to the sort. I do save all the batting scraps in a big bag which I raid for smaller projects. The tiniest scraps of fabric, all of which are unsuitable for reuse, went into my thread catcher bag, which holds the snips of yarn from my crochet, too. I call this shoddy, and I want to find a way to reuse it, even if it's as stuffing for toys. I'll brood on that.

Lace and ribbons that can be reused went into my lace and ribbon snips box. I use these a lot.

I ended up with three gallon size bags of scraps in small, medium and large sizes, as well as a pile of selvages.

It's nice to empty the scraps bag while looking back on what I have done over the last year. It also gave me a nudge to start sewing and quilting again more often.

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