I’m doing it again - why not?

It really does keep me working on it - and I still do have a couple more smallish bags to do - I found them while working in my sewing room.

As I pick up various pieces - I just throw them into a bag if I can’t tell what it is right away - and then will just cut up and/or sort at the same time. I have actually three such bags to do this with in February. Then I may be caught up. I keep saying that, but keep finding more - much less create more! Oh well.

I’m finding it to be an effective way to handle the scraps problem in my sewing room. At least I’m trying to do that, anyway.

Here is my tote that I’ve worked out of for this month. It was pretty full when I started.

Now that I emptied it of fabric, I’ve relocated it to below the basement stairs and am using it to hold Hot Wheels track and Nerf guns. I think it came from the basement anyway - not sure what used to be in it. I don’t need it upstairs in my house - seems to be a good use for it - long term.

There was quite a bit in this tote this time - but quite a bit of it was nice and neat - so not terribly hard to cut up.

What makes it hard to cut a lot, at times, is when it is in a bunch of sizes that are random - truly bits and pieces. This particular batch (under the messy top stuff) was already flat and stacked as I had purchased some from my friend back in November. She was trying to clean out her apartment as she is hoping to move. They were here leftovers from mask making so lots of them were about 6” strips.

I did take a bit of those pieces in the totes - the pieces that were leftover backing pieces and cut them into 6.5” squares for further charity quilts - to be combined with an alternate block.

Here are the photos of all three of my baskets together - before I weighed anything.

This month - I cut into strips this much -

2.5” - 7.72 lbs.

2” - 4.3 lbs.

1.5” - 1.87 lbs.

And you can see, I’m starting to get itching to working on using some of these up. I have lot of these and want to start making a dent on the 2.5” strips. Having a lot is fun as it lets me have quite a bit to choose from when I go to make something. And for whatever reason, 2.5” seems a lot bigger than 2” when I work with them. I guess it’s because they are about 25% bigger! :) Seems bigger than that even, though.

So here’s my chart - which, naturally, since it is only January, is mostly empty!

I hope this encourages someone, somehow, to try to keep your scraps in a sort of system that works for you. This is what I’m doing. At least I’m attempting to. All sewists know they run away from us so very quickly!

Below are five quilts I made from my 2” strips starting back in 2015. This is just to show you that you CAN make interesting things from scraps -

I used 2” strips for these.