Since January 1st I've been mulling over the state of the sewing room, and my stash, and what I want to achieve.  Every year I have a meltdown over my scraps, and either try to conquer them, or give them away to Mereth, and yet I still have boxes of bits and pieces cluttering up the place.  It irritates me, and yet I feel this need to deal with them, not simply pass the problem onto Mereth (she doesn't see it as a problem, but she has even less room than I do, and she doesn't need to be overwhelmed by my cast-offs).

I tried really hard to choose a block that would use up a heap of scraps.

This one was on the design wall for about a week, while I tried to work out why I didn't like my fabric choices.  Still don't like them, but still don't know why. Too dark, too murky, who knows.

I tried a different way to piece the block, in different colours.

Nope.

Then I tried this block, which I do love, but I just couldn't get a handle on the colours I wanted for it either  It was easy to cut, and easy to sew, and I love the block itself, but I still couldn't throw myself into it. And as I discovered, you have to make sure all the blocks are spinning in the same direction.  Plenty of room for mistakes there. Sigh.

Then, as I continued to find boxes of strips and units and scraps and offcuts and remnants of other projects, I realised that I was actually trying to make a new project with those stars, not use up all my scraps.  Each star used 18" of a 2.5" strip, and most of my scraps are narrower than that.  I was fussing over the colours and actually cutting new strips for it. It was never going to help my existing scrap problem.

I've done a lot of quilts that use 3.5 and 1.5" strips in the last few years, with all the resulting leftovers. I needed a pattern that would use those up, and that would be random enough that I wasn't constantly trying to match colours, and that would use a heap of the pieces already leftover from other quilts. And was simple.  I was trying to be too clever, trying to choose the 'perfect' block that would make all my scraps disappear.

Once it occurred to me that I needed a pattern that would use all these existing bits together, without the need to cut lots of new pieces, I remembered a favourite pattern from long ago, from this book.

It's so easy, just Rail Fence and 9-patch blocks.

I made this pattern, about 20 years ago, and it was DD's bed quilt for many years.

It's an easy pattern to piece, and will be perfect as a Leader-Ender. It's nothing earth-shattering, but it will use up those scraps and help me clean up the sewing room.  Now that I've decided, I just need to get sewing.