Clearing The Rubble

 In my clearing spree yesterday I  found a lot of little things that had been lying around unnoticed for months.  I would move this rubble from place to place, thinking, I really must find a home for that. or deal with it, or throw it out, and it would just get shuffled out of the way. If I'm in a mad rush to finish blocks I don't want to slow down and decide what to do with 3 partial 4patches and some random scraps of solid fabric from a scrap bag. After a while those things become invisible.

Here's a sampling of what I came across yesterday;

• a bit of strip piecing that I used for explanatory magazine pictures

I unpicked the wider strips and cut HSTs for the This and That blocks. Definitely worth doing. The 2 narrow strips went into the container of 1.5" strip piecing.

• a block that needed a 3.5" square to be complete

This has hung around on top of piles of stuff for months. I kept searching for more of that pink, and finally gave up on finding another 3.5" square. I poverty pieced it out of three scraps, and now the block is in the Plaid project box where it should be.

• a stack of orphan blocks that should have been in the orphan drawer

Easy fix. Open drawer, place blocks inside, shut drawer.

• 2 mystery containers

I really had no idea what these were about. I'm not losing my mind totally, I remembered as soon as I opened each one.

I double stitched the flippy corners on my Boxy Stars blocks, and saved them, sewed them into triangles, trimmed them and assembled them into these little 3.5" blocks. And forgot about them.  I'm thinking a pine Tree top, or Cut Glass.  There's 28 made and 10 more kitted; I'll make a little status card and put them with the other project boxes.

The other box was chock full of random pieced squares.  Last summer, or the year before I sat in my air-conditioned shed and whiled away the hours making HSTs out of triangle scraps. I always have a drawer full of triangle shaped bits, which I periodically sew together and then turn into these. There were enough pairs for 10 more quadrants for the This and That blocks; single HSTs went into the box where they should have been all along. I'll find containers for all the other size HSTs. And label them.

• several 1" finished cheddar and indigo HSTs

I was piecing these when I made a string pieced star from shirts. I really should file them with that.

• offcuts from customer backings that should have been in the strings container

These have their own container, so that's where they will go.

• Little solid scraps

I do want to make Sawtooth Stars from solid fabric, there's always some in the scrapbags we find. I pulled out a boxfile and gave them a home.

I really can't explain why I repeatedly dump things instead of dealing with them properly.  Nearly everything I found had a home, I just hadn't bothered to put things there. I can't promise to be better in future, because I've always been like this, but I do want to commit to clearing surfaces more often.  Another mantra to add to my list. 

• Label Everything
• Look in all the boxes
• Clear the surfaces weekly

And maybe, Learn what to throw away.