Organizing the scraps

This hasn't been a highly productive quilting week.  Things are changing around here and my quilting time has been significantly reduced.  First of all, Miss C., my 3-year-old started preschool this week!  I am trying to run all my errands during preschool because it is way easier to get things done with only two kids rather than three.  That leads to the second change.  Morning naps for the twins are a thing of the past.  They haven't been taking great afternoon naps recently so I decided it's time to eliminate the morning one.  Finally, Miss C. finds it unnecessary to take her afternoon nap anymore.  This one makes me really sad.  We have had a great run.  I think she has taken one nap in the past two weeks.  We still pretend she will sleep.  I read her stories and put her to bed and she plays "quietly" in her room while the babies sleep.  Today wasn't so quite so I took her "special crayons"--the fabulous Crayola markers that only write on their special paper.  Those are a brilliant invention.

I did learn one lesson this week.  While you are happily quilting in a quiet house during naptime, don't assume they are all truly napping.  Your 3-year-old just might be quiet because she may have found a bottle of lotion on the shelf that she is now liberally applying to herself, her sheets, her books, her bed and the carpet.  But boy will that room smell nice when she is done.

Onto what I actually did accomplish.  I was inspired by an article in the most recent issue of Fat Quarterly e-magazine on dealing with scraps.  I decided it was time to get mine under control and make them more usable. They had lots of great suggestions, and I decided to cut mine according to how I generally use fabric.  I didn't take a before and after, but I think the after looks pretty great.  I reduced the mass a lot by just cutting things up.

In general these were my guidelines.  I gave myself several different cutting options and was able to save the majority of each scrap. 

• 5" charms for anything large enough
• 2.5" x 5" coins for anything I couldn't make into a charm
• 3" squares for half square triangles because I like to square them up to 2.5" squares
• 2.5" squares for scrappy borders and smaller HST
• 2.5" strips for anything longer than 10"
• thinner strips went into my bags for strings quilts

The top bag is just leftover binding strips. 

If I had a lot of one particular fabric line, I kept it all together.  Here I have a ton of Figgy Pudding from Basic Grey last Christmas.  I made a quilt from this as well as skirts for my girls and had lots of smaller scraps.  I cut this into 5" charms, 2.5x5" coins, 2.5" strips (for anything long), 4" squares, 3" squares and 2.5" squares. 

I had quite a bit of Verna left over too after two quilts.  I cut it into charms and coins.

I also really cleaned up my fabric strips.  They are now all organized by color.  I'm considering making a spiderweb quilt with them.  I have to use them up somehow.