I've spent part of my afternoon sorting through a huge bag of yard sale scraps. Grandma has already been through these bags, pulling out the larger pieces and sorting them by color for me. This bag is what was left and didn't have a place in the other, nicely organized bags.
Going through it is daunting. There are pins. I didn't get stuck badly, just enough to warn me to watch out. I don't really want to do this. But I do want to make the baby quilts that I see lurking in there, and most of it is good cotton.
I don't throw out good cotton.
I don't throw out good cotton.
So I'm pulling out a piece at a time and deciding if it would be better to cut it with my rotary cutter or my 2 1/2" squares die. A lot of AccuQuilt users will advise you to cut squares with the strip dies, but I wouldn't want to do that with these scraps...
That black floral piece seems to be a balloon. I want to know what quilt that was for! Now it's been reduced to two 2 1/2" squares.
Bonnie Hunter wrote this post about taming her strash (I love that term -- and the glimpse of what she does with her scraps!) a few months ago. I'm not sorting my mess by color because I'm cutting it up for super-scrappy quilts and most of these fabrics really aren't an easily definable color anyway.
I have been taming my stash now for over a year, I work on it here and there when I get in the mood. It is almost to the end, finally. One thing I do is when I work on a new project, all the fabric for that project stays with that project till the top is done, then I use as much fabric as possible on the back to prevent any of it going into the scrap bins. If I still have some left over it immediately gets cut into squares or strips, and the rest goes into string bins or crumb jars. Nothing goes into the scrap bins I am getting rid of, one by one.
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