Playing with Scraps

I was thrilled to be able to attend a trunk show presented by the very talented Cheryl Arkison of Sunday Morning Quilts fame!

And I was super-excited that I was able to purchase a copy of her soon-to-be released book, A Month of Sundays!

I already own her first book, and it was neat to see the quilts "in-person" and hear the back stories for many of the quilts, and the quilt names. Cheryl is a great presenter!

Although I do cut up my scraps for future scrappy projects, using Bonnie Hunter's Scrap User's System, I have only been doing this for the last couple of years, and when people know you use scraps, they give you their scraps! So I have an abundance of scraps...a ton of scraps...bins of scraps!

I have slowly been working through the scraps, cutting them into squares, bricks and strips, but it is taking forever! In the meantime, there are a lot of goodies in there that I could probably use in my projects, if only they were more accessible.

I read Cheryl's scrap sorting method in Sunday Morning Quilts, but until she shared the logic behind her sorting method (by colours, strings, and selvage triangle trims are some of the examples), and how it made it easier to access and use them, it didn't sound like something I needed to do. It totally makes sense now! And, she said it doesn't take that long at all.

With my supervisor, aptly named Patches, keeping a watchful eye, I got started.

Well, it has taken me hours to sort through several bins, but now I can see the colour piles, what I have a lot of, and what I don't.

 

Inspecting the progress

Scrap explosion!

Some oldies, and favourites.

Moda from 2003-2004

Aren't these cowgirls cute!

I made a dress for my daughter with this fabric!

This fabric had antique red Ford Trucks on it.

Scribble Bears from P&B Textiles

Since I have cut up a lot of my scraps, they have kind of been picked over, so many of them are of the darker, tonal variety. Those need to be cut up smaller and used in something else.

I grabbed my pile of greens and pulled out all the clear, mostly bright colours, no tonals, and sewed together three "slabs" this morning.

Fun to do, and fairly quick using the larger pieces. Another quilt I made, Modern Crumbs, used much smaller pieces, so the blocks took a lot longer to piece. It was liberating to use the bigger pieces in my scrap pile!

Nothing left but snippets to stuff a cat bed!

And of course, my Qu.A.D.D (Quilter's Attention Deficit Disorder!) means that I can't keep focused on one project at a time...so, I have been cutting up fabric to make a low-volume quilt, inspired by FITF's Marcelle Plus Quilt and using this block size post on Flickr. I have enough brights cut out for 90 blocks, enough to make a queen size quilt AND a lap size quilt! Whoa Nelly!!



Of course, I had to enhance my stash with some low volume prints, so I bought these beauties from Super-Buzzy! I found a link to Super Buzzy on another blog, and... Could. Not. Resist! The delivery was SUPER-FAST and I am so pleased with the fabrics. I had them mail to Ship Happens in Blaine, to save on delivery (mailing from the US to Canada is sooo expensive) and it was mailed the next day and these lovelies were in my hands within a few days! I highly recommend them! 

 

 

Happy quilting!

 

~Kat