Wordless WIP Wednesday

        

Scraptastic

Before my week off, I set myself a goal: to deal with my scraps. They were seriously out of control. Some of them were sorted by color into small containers. Most of them were in a giant pile on the floor. A while back, I dumped them out of their big container to force myself to deal with them. And then I didn’t.

Here’s what that pile looked like when I started:

And that doesn’t even include the stuff that was stored in bins…

Oi.

I started by sorting them into piles by color, and also chose which ones to throw away, or give away.

Then, color by color, I sorted and stored. I thought about cutting pieces to certain sizes, but since I don’t have a go to piece size, that seemed like a lot of work. Instead, I just checked to be sure pieces were of usable sizes and tried to gather like with like. Very technical, right?

Slowly but surely, I made progress.

When I got to purple, I had some fun surprises.

The first and biggest surprise was that I had more blue scraps than purple. Shocking! And also nearly as much green as purple.

The next surprise? Pieces of fabric from my first ever quilt, way back in the 90s. Very cool to have found them. I’ll have to work them back into something. I also found some bits of my elusive sugar block backing fabric, and I’m hopeful I might be able to squeak out one more block. Or maybe, please, 2.

Here’s a look at what a color bin looked like when it was nearly done:

When I finally finished, I had bins for purple, blue, green, red, pink, yellow/orange, brown, black/white, and grey. Phew!

Plus, a big pile of novelty bits that I have yet to decide what to do with. And a big bag of totally useable bits that I know I’ll never use, so they’re going to the art room at my daughter’s school. Win/win!

It feels so good to have this done. Now, I’ll just have to keep the bins in decent order. Hah.

It’s time to bind…

Helllooooo?

Anyone still out there?

We took that little vacation to Taos and Santa Fe- and we had a blast. So much fun. Then when we got home, I had that week off from work, and I DID tackle my scraps- more on that later. We also started the super fun project of cleaning out our very very very cluttered garage. And Annie had a performance of The Tempest. And Henry had middle school orientation. We’ve been running around like crazy- and I haven’t been blogging at all.

I also haven’t been sewing at all. After I cleaned up all the scraps- hooray!!- I got buried again. Part of the garage de-clutter is dealing with all my clothes. I’ve slowly but steadily put on weight over the years, and I have a lot of smaller clothes stashed for “one day”. Well, I’m down over 20 pounds in the last 5 months! Most of what’s in my closet currently is too big, and so it was time to go through the skinnier clothes. The sewing room is currently ground zero for sorting- fits now, will hopefully fit soon, and too big so time to donate… Phew!

But… on Friday my quilter delivered my Modern Cross quilt! So I did dig my way through the mess to get to my machine, so I could start the binding.

Just squaring it up, at around 95×100, was a slightly Herculean feat. I decided to use leftovers from the backing for the binding. The colors were just right, and I only had to cut and join 5 strips.

Then there was the joy of shoving it through my machine to attach the first side of the binding.

I settled in for some serious handwork.

But at least one of my all time favorite ever movies was on TV. And in an aside, look at this awesome little present I bought myself last week.

Now all I need is Jake Ryan for my life to be complete.

I’m nearly 50% done.

Of course, then I need to sew on all the buttons- one for the center of each cross.

Yikes!

On the bright side, all this handwork will keep me busy until the sewing room is more functional…

Meanwhile, linking up with Sew Cute Tuesday, WIP Wednesday, and Let’s Bee Social.

WIP Wednesday (the teensy tiny version)

We’ve been so busy around this joint- building new patio furniture to replace what was ravaged by the epic September hailstorm…     

 

And then finally putting up the awesome new mailbox my mom gave me for xmas…    plus going to see The Breakfast Club on the big screen with 12 of my nearest and dearest,   

(and who could forget our geeky weekend) that there’s barely been any time for sewing.

But I did manage to pull off a little bit. 2 little bits, actually. 2 blocks for Quilting Jet Girl’s wonderful project- read about it here.

I made one block for each quilt. First, for the boy:  I was so excited to have a use for that music note fabric- I think it’s been in my stash for 10 years or more! And some of my ever growing stash of tonal pearl bracelets. They’re just so useful.

Next, for the girl’s quilt. I found a tutorial for a fish, and just adapted it a tiny bit to make it the right size… (If you use the same tutorial for the same project, I’d suggest reducing the center rectangle of the fish’d body rather than shortening the tail blocks like I did.) It was wonderful that my new Tula pink and grey print fit the requirements exactly- and that the blue came from stash. Something about butterflies on a fish makes me smile- and hopefully it will do the same for the recipient.

Meanwhile, there’s going to be even less sewing around this place for a bit. We’re taking a long weekend in Santa Fe (have I mentioned how much I like working at a school, and getting breaks off?) When we get back, I’ll still have 5 full days off from work, and while I’ve filled those days with breakfast and lunch plans with friends, I also plan to tackle an ugly project.

My scraps.

I’m going to turn on the TV in the sewing room, and not sew anything until the awful scrap disaster is dealt with. Hopefully I won’t exhaust Netflix’s streaming options before then! Wish me luck. And- if you have any great scrap organizing tips, send em my way!

Linking up with WIP Wednesday and Let’s Bee Social.