Sunday, March 10, 2019

Enough Already

I went through my sewing room yesterday, and put away every FQ or piece of yardage that was sitting on my tables. Some of the stacks were from 4 quilts ago, and I'm just terrible at cleaning up before I start the next thing.
 Look at it!. Stuff everywhere, and no rhyme or reason to it.
That's my sewing table there; I'm now sewing on a little 99K, as my 6500 is displaying an error message again.  I'll take it to the people in Adelaide this time, and find out exactly what is wrong with it. But dang if that little black machine doesn't sew like a dream.

I really enjoyed Mary at Country Threads tour of her sewing spaces, here & here. And Connie's here & here. I love seeing where people sew, and what they have, and how it's stored. I trawl through Pinterest looking for ideas, but so many of those spaces are just for photography.  They're pristine and colour coordinated, with some really dinky ideas on storage. One picture was titled, Ideal Way To Store Scraps, and every little piece of fabric was clipped to a rail on the wall.

HaH!! Those aren't scraps; THESE are scraps.






Bear in mind that I have made two quilts from scraps recently, I've cut up heaps for my strip drawers, I've gifted many baskets of offcuts to Mereth, and I wage war on scraps every January, and this is what's left.

I've spent a lot of time working around all this clutter, and it's time I said 'Enough already!' It's OK to have all this scrap fabric, but it's not OK to have it stored in 17 different make-shift containers.  It's not OK to stash it in a cupboard and forget it even exists.  It's not OK to search high and low for something, and find it days later inside one of those piles of fabric.  

It took nearly all of yesterday to put away the FQs and yardage, and label every drawer so I could find things more easily.  It will take most of today to sort out those containers so that something can be done with the scraps, and there will be hours of decisions and cutting and labeling after that.  But I have to start somewhere, and I'm not dismayed.  It feels good to actually be tackling the problem, instead of ignoring it.
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5 comments:

  1. Suzanne8:53 PM

    Looks like a treasure trove to me! Please show “after” photos too- I also love to see how quilters manage their scrap stash. Suzanne

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  2. Rose Marie1:43 AM

    So many scraps, but the possibilities of future quilts are there to dip into more easily now. Yep, I need to tackle my scraps and get a better handle on them too. Thanks for the little shove! LOL

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  3. Shelina6:00 AM

    It looks like a fun place to play. All those pristine places make me nervous! I have trying to clean / organizing / straightening my sewing room this year. Other things keep taking priority, but hopefully it will be straightened out a little at a time. My plan is to always have a scrap quilt on the go so that those scraps can stay under control.

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  4. Holly10:48 AM

    Hello, you have my sympathies... I have the same scrap issues! I think this quilt would use up many of your scraps, https://www.etsy.com/listing/556543112/the-lincoln-museum-quilt-a-reproduction
    I plan to make it soon, but don't think I'll bother buying the pattern as it would be easy to do on a 2 or 3" strip size, then the star would be six or nine inches. The star could even be made "liberated" or free hand style.
    I enjoy reading about your quilting life, and seeing all your quilts. Thank you!

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  5. Mary Johnson4:27 PM

    I really miss my wall of cubbies that I had when we lived in Minneapolis. I’ve got a small shelving unit that has a 6 cubbies and most of my scraps live there but there are bins for strings and for scraps that don’t fit. I’m tempted to buy more shelving but I’m afraid as soon as I did, it would be time to move everything again and it wouldn’t fit anymore.

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