This is actually the living room. For a change, I left the table and sat on the sofa to sort. I had to decide/sort the scraps/strips that were all jumbled up together and crumbs. What a mess!

I'm not particularly proud of the piles I had. But I dealt with them and they are gone now!

I spent a lot of time in February and March cutting and trimming scraps. Lots of time. As I saw serious progress - that meaning - diminishing piles of scraps - I actually got more determined than ever to "finish them off". I had brought out several laundry baskets full into my dining room area - and the mess was seriously hindering progress on quilting and every area of life, actually. I either had to deal with it all or throw it back in my fabric room. I really didn't want the mess back in the fabric room--I had just taken it out of that room!

So, I dealt with it. While I believe I have some more bags of scraps in a room downstairs I decided not to go into that room until April. LOL

This is what I ended up with in MARCH alone.

And yes, I am heaving a sign of relief!

So, for March, I cut down scraps into these totals:

1.5" strips- 12.6 lbs.

2" strips - 75.3 lbs. (That is a LOT of 2" strips.)

2.5" strips - 27.8 lbs.

so, once I added my new bags of strips to my old ones, they look like this. Yes...at this point, I have them all in bags:

I do have something like 4 bags of crumbs and strips. That is crazy!  But I'd rather have them in this form than in the previous form! This way they are quite usable - even it means I have to pull strips out of bags. I know many of you sort you… — I do have something like 4 bags of crumbs and strips. That is crazy! But I'd rather have them in this form than in the previous form! This way they are quite usable - even it means I have to pull strips out of bags. I know many of you sort yours by colors - maybe at some point I will do that. I'm sure they would take less space if they were rolled into nice neat piles. Maybe someday if I get too tired of sewing I'll tackle that. It would be pretty cool, actually, to have them all stacked in boxes like that.

So, for a summary report for 2017:

I'm hoping I never have such a big report again. Why? Well, I had let the scraps pile up so much that I had a lot to process. Hopefully I won't ever have that much to deal with at once. I realize as you finish up a quilt, you do create scraps. For example, just the cuttings off the backings of 10 charity quilts creates at least 40 pieces of scraps - and so it goes!

For those of you who don't really know me, you may ask...

"But what do you do with these strips?"

So far the 2.5" strips have been mostly used for bindings.

I need to work on some quilts using them up. I can search for Jelly Roll quilts or 2.5" strips quilts on the internet. There are hundreds of them.

I have some ideas for the 1.5" strips including a couple of log cabin quilts.
The 2" ones I had - I never touched those until the summer of '15 when I decided to use up my bags (I had 2 at that time) of 2" strips. Thus began my 2" strips project. So far I've made up 47 quilts using primarily 2" strips - or at the minimum, they were the starting point of these quilts. They range from a simple light/dark/light to a fun 3D look to a super simple design to somewhat more complex. It's been a fun ride.

I have one drying on my kitchen table right now and have several more in the planning stage! The only thing keeping me from working on them right now is the fact that I'm focusing on getting at least 10 charity quilts done "now", before major progress on anything else.

March strips report