March 2021 Strips Report Summary
I know it’s not quite the end of the month - but it’s close. And I probably won’t do any more this month - so I figured I can show it now!
I cut up a lot of scraps right at the beginning of the month and then because I thought I was almost caught up, I thought I was done for the year.
Then I discovered some more, though not a tremendous amount. So I will have at least one more month’s worth to report for this part of the year. Of course, I will continue to create more. That’s a given.
It’s a pretty good sized box. I’ll tackle this one in April as I’m ready to see the scraps in it made into usable sizes for charity quilts. I may cut them into 4.5” strips and then squares - or even 5” square if I can fit it as the quilt tops go together more quickly and it leaves the designs bigger. For the most part these are novelty type prints - a lot of white on them - and all from Polish companies. They are a little on the primitive side when it comes to designs, but when paired with some solids in bright, bold colors (or not), they will work just fine into mostly children’s charity tops! Just need a few more elves to help me sew!
I also do have a box of scraps I had bought last year - and will just go ahead and cut it up into strips and squares. I will probably cut it up into squares as much as possible first - whatever works, and then when they are too small, will cut into strips.
I’ll try to do that in April. I’m tired of looking at the box.
Later in the year I will probably need to do more in order to take the scraps from all the charity quilts I am doing. They always generate a lot of strips!
But other than this box and a few scraps I’ve found since the beginning of March, I actually haven’t located a lot left to chop up. And that makes me very, very happy!
Anyway…here is what I did in March
1.5” strips - 1 kg or 2.2 lbs.
1.5” - 2.2 lbs.
2” strips - 1.4 kg or 3.03 lbs.
2” - 3.03 lbs.
2.5” strips - 1.5 kg or 3.3 lbs.
2.5” strips - 3.3 lbs.
Here are all three baskets side by side!
From the left - 1.5”, 2” and 2.5” containers
You can see this month I didn’t do a whole lot.
But even at that, if you visualized 2 “Jelly Rolls” for the first laundry basket, 3 for the second and 3 for the third, that is the equivalent weight that I cut up if we figure a “Jelly Rolls” (or 2.5” strips roll) - weighs about a pound. That’s really amazing - and to think that I have helped turn scraps into the equivalent weight of strips as 8 of those wonderful 2.5" strips rolls - well, I’m okay with that even in a small month.
If you compare this year to other years, you can see that I’m on target to have a much smaller year than others for cutting up into scraps.
These are my totals in the other years when I did this cutting and keeping track!
It’s fine - as I actually do not have bags and bags of these scraps lying around to cut up!
Except for greens - I do happen to have enough greens around for me to spend the month cutting - or at least a couple of weeks - at half hour a day. I’ve not done it yet because I’m waiting to see with those what size strips I need. If I need a bunch more strips for the Checkered top, then I’ll cut them 1.5” - focusing on that, but if not, I may go bigger if I can. Bigger is ever so much faster.
After working a lot with the 1.5” strips, the 2.5” ones seem enormous!
And this blog post while not terribly fascinating, is more about keeping ME in line than inspiring you.
Except maybe I can help you see what I do to help keep these things under control - sometimes I utterly fail at it, however. But the good thing is, I keep trying to get up, dust myself off, and get back at cutting them up.
But this is a reminder - this is where my 2” strips series came from. I had had 2 big bags of these things and was never even digging into them - so I started that series.
But now I’d like to focus a little bit on using up some more of my 2.5” ones in a fun and nice way as I have plenty of bags of those. But since I’ve spent so much time cutting them up, I want the quilt tops to be nice that are made from them.
One of my original things I did back a while ago was a modified “Jelly Roll Race quilt” - let me show you. I went through strips with certain colorways in mind. I did several of them and kind of got “that out of my system”. Yes, they were very fast - and actually quite popular as charity quilts. These I finished back in 2013, 2014, and 2015.
So what did you think of my wild quilting on that top left one? I just went all different directions in a crazy way with sort of straight line quilting!
That was on purpose.
The idea was to lend credence to the whole uneven nature of the pattern, quilt, colors, etc. Why not? However, it was harder to do that than a simple straight line quilting as I did later with the others. With the bottom two, I actually used a Crayola WASHABLE marker and drew lines on it to help keep me straight and just did plain straight quilting with the walking foot at random intervals. They were all pretty large quilts, so it was not a small feat!
Anyway….I kind of got all “Jelly Roll Raced out” and have no intentions on doing these again.
I’d much prefer this one shown on the right - a Light ‘n Dark quilt - which I did make with 2.5” strips.
Anyway…thanks so much for coming on this quilting journey with me!
Have a great day wherever you are reading this! Stay safe!
Be sure to check out what my sis has for you in the store here!
Here’s one of the beauties we have!
