Here is a quick post to share my current work, and to try out my Christmas laptop from DH.  I haven’t finished setting it up yet, but so far so good.  Maybe I’ll post more often if I won’t have to wait forever for everything to load.

I’m in the middle of sewing eighteen string blocks for Kat’s Jan/Feb block drive for Covered in Love.  I have many, many strings, but I wasn’t sure I had anything but leftover, muddy colors.  Then I looked at the drawer by my cutting table, a half-way house for strips not yet sorted by color.  I forgot that I had just 5’made lots of donation pillowcases and other projects that left lots of colorful strings.  The strings I save are less than 2.5″, but no less than 1.5″.

Many of you have shown photos of cleaning up your spaces to get a fresh start for the year, including cutting up the scraps.  I did, too, and friends seemed impressed, but what you have to know is that my scrap bin is tiny, just about 6″ x 8″.  It fits on my small cutting table, and fills up fast, so I have to attend to it before overflows and falls over (with or without help from cats).  It’s so small that emptying it is never too daunting, but a good procrastination task when I don’t want to start something new.   I don’t cut scraps after every project, but every three or four, or whenever it’s very full.  I like to leave the scraps from a quilt to marinate a bit until it is completely quilted and bound, just in case I need to fix or change something or use them in a label.

When I do cut, I cut 2.5 width of fabric strips, and squares.  My squares are 2.5″, 3.5″, 4.5″, and 6.5″.  I just added the 4.5″ squares in the last month, because I’ve been doing donation blocks that use a lot of that size.  I store my scraps by size, except for the strings.  I have so many of those that I sort them by color.  Eventually.

Can’t wait to see what you’re doing this week!