A little diversion

 Last night I was getting the fan for the sewing room pulled out of storage, because all of a sudden it's HOT, when I spied a plastic box that I hadn't opened in years. Wot's in there? I wondered.

It was full of bits from a giant scrap project from 2005, when I cut most of my 'not-good' stash into 1.5" strips and sewed 9 quilts in various patterns of my own devising. It took months, and of course I didn't really love the quilts because they were made of fabric I didn't really like, so I sold all of them. Now I wonder why I didn't just sell the fabric and spend those months sewing quilts I loved. 

Anyway, I sorted out all these bits and pieces, resisted the urge to sew them into blocks and start another scrap-disaster, and spent the evening joining the 4.5" & 3.5" bits together to make piano key lengths. 

I should have measured what I rolled onto the cardboard tube, but it was 5 lengths of my ironing board, so a fair length. 

It's going into the basket containing the scrap strippy quilt I started in March this year. Looking at these fabrics I think they may have been genuine scraps, there are some old favourites in there.

There's a heap of these little 2.5" units to sew into blocks, which I'll do soon. I'm thinking YUK when I look at these, but the fabrics aren't that hideous, it's just the way I put them together. I'm very much in favour of planned scrap quilts, I'm never happy when I try to do random scrappy.  

These blocks aren't doing it for me, definitely made from some unloved fabrics, but I'll put them in with the orphan blocks for now.  And there were some blocks that were so ugly I put them in the bin. Done and dealt with. 16 years is long enough for anything to lurk in a cupboard. You can't rescue everything.