Scrap Chaos (Again)

My cutting table looked like this again. It never stays clear for very long.

It was a mammoth effort to sort it all, and cut up the bits for all the various projects. It took the better part of a day, and my mind was fried at the end. So many decisions!! So even though I was tempted to abandon it halfway through and go back to making a mess, I remained dedicated. 

It will be much nicer to work in this space now, and I won't lose rulers and cutters under the mess. I can't guarantee that it will stay like this for much longer, because there are still scraps to cut, but at least I won't be building on the mess that was there.

Every time I start a random scrap quilt I pull containers off shelves and out of cupboards and act like I'll be getting rid of the bits once and for all. But every time I find new containers that I didn't know were full of scraps, so they are never going to go away completely. After years of foisting scraps onto Mereth, years of scrap quilts, I'm still inundated with them. 

I drew up the Ladder quilt in EQ8 and it says it takes 4.5m. Is that all? 4.5m of scraps is a lot of ironing and cutting, but it's hardly a dent in the pile. I think I'll end up making at least 1 more quilt in this pattern, using some of the really bright fabrics that I don't like. Someone will like them, and I can just add it to the donation pile. 

I want to be sewing on my good projects, but I'm stuck on the scrap dealing for some reason. I guess I don't want to pull out good fabric and iron it and cut it when my room is still covered in these bits and pieces. I think it will be worth a few more days of cutting if I can get all this stuff dealt with.

This is how I'm working through the piles. First I pull out all the light fabrics and they get cut into 3"squares for my Flying Geese blocks. Any leftover bits are cut into 2.5"squares for my Scrap Squares leader-ender, or 1.5"squares to go into the box.

My dark and medium scraps are dealt with differently. If it's a big piece, like a FQ remnant, I cut an 8.5"strip. This gets cut into 8.5"squares for the Scrappy Montain Majesty blocks. There's often a little bit of the strip left and it becomes a 2.5" strip, which I cut into a 4.5" brick, and a square. The bricks are being amassed for another Brickwork quilt, and the squares go into the box for the current leader-ender.

If it's a smaller scrap I try to get a 4.5"strip from it. That gets sub-cut into 2.5"slices; sets of 4 go into the Ladder project box, the rest go into the bricks collection. If I can get four 1.5" strips at the end then they go into the Ladder box as well. If there's not enough for 4 then the 1.5"strips go into a drawer for a future piano key border.

Little scraps get cut into 2.5", 2", or 1.5"strips. The 2"strips are going to become another Carolina Chain quilt, or a variation of it, and the others go into the Ladder project, or the bricks, or the piano key border. 

And some scraps are only enough for a single square, and that just gets filed in the right box. So far, this system is working really well, it's removed a lot of decisions I normally go through. Should I cut a 6.5"strip, it's big enough, but what will I do with that. Should I cut this or that, or both, or....Just being committed to the 8.5"and 4.5" strips means that a whole chunk of the scrap can be decided with 2 cuts.

My scrap drawers are pretty full already, so cutting directly to projects stops me from scrunching more into them. Once I have a handle on all this I'll have to pick a project and cut from the drawers. And someone needs to call an intervention if I ever buy another scrapbag from Facebook.