Back Again to the Scraps

Tuesday, I started on another box of leftovers and scraps and finished going through it Wednesday between loads of laundry.  This was another box that I had somewhat sorted earlier. I made some good  progress this time around. I stated with the box marked Parts Department (from Collaborative Quilts book by Gwen Marston and Freddy Moran). I found some things that should be combined with the same thing in other boxes. I ended up working with three boxes.
I found zip lock bags with Laurel Burch leftover HST's  and a zip lock with 4 1/2 inch Laurel Burch fabric squares and a sizable piece of fabric from which I had fussy cut squares for this quilt.







































This is from several years ago and was the last of a series of my original layout quilts using pictorial fabric and Birds in the Air blocks and this quilt also had some "North Wind" blocks. I loved the fabric I used and I had a lot of fun figuring out the on point setting and putting everything together.

These below are some of the pieces I found Wednesday in different boxes. The HST's are 2 1/2 inches. There are some improv blocks, a bag of 4 1/2 inch squares, and that large piece with 3 jungle cats that someone gave me. I found  pieces of the black dotty fabric and the fuchsia fabric as well as odds and ends of partial blocks. Now that they are all together in one place I see that I have enough there to make something. I am looking forward to making something. I found even more Laurel Burch cat fabric Thursday when I looked for something else. I am pretty happy about all of the Laurel Burch fabric I found.




I stuck this panel up on the wall over the yellow and orange blocks and I remember doing this another time. I have something in mind to make using the panel and orange,yellow, blue and green. It will be small and I think it will be soon.

I came across a lot of good things that I can use, zip lock bags with twenty or more of the same or coordinating fabric some are HST's, some are 4 patches both kinds are a variety of sizes. There are also filler or border strips of small blocks in usable sizes, and there is even a lightning bolt strip.

Almost everything is put away now in a way that will be easy to find and use. Next I might tackle the HST box. After that I think I will actually work on one of the projects the has piqued my interest.

I went to the Farmpark Quilt show today and it is vendors weekend. I told myself I could not buy anything unless it is something I need to finish something from one of the things I found these past few days. Well...... I have never liked being told what I can't do. I bought 2 pieces of fabric but I can justify my purchase because I planned to come right home and make potholders with some chicken fabric. I have some metal roosters above my kitchen doorway and I wanted some chicken potholders. I haven't started them yet,,,,,,, but maybe Monday.

The Farmpark quilt show was very nice.  The Best of Show was a wonderful quilt with amazing workman ship. The quilter's statement said it was a ten year project.
Click here to see small sample of the quilts, including Best of Show.

Back to the Scraps

Due to high wind advisories yesterday we stayed in all day. That gave me time to get back to my project of cleaning up/organizing/getting rid of my overwhelming collection of scraps.  After I put away the Christmas things, I had them all out and all over every flat surface in my sewing room. I just could not stay focused; I ended up sorting things in some vague sort of organization and putting it all  away.

Today I pulled out one storage cube to work on. I decided that I would do some sewing and trimming and discarding, whatever it took to make some progress and some sense out of all the stuff in that cube.

 These are some larger pieces of "made fabric" from which I have already cut, and used, some 4 1/2 inch or slightly larger blocks. I folded these and set them aside in a zip lock bag. I will probably keep adding on to them for cutting smaller blocks.

This is a pile of  smaller pieces that are "made fabric" starter or in progress blocks.









These are some of the blocks from that pile. I trimmed the edges so they are straight and ready to have additions on any side. I set these aside in zip lock bags as well.  Most likely, these will be trimmed when they are close to the size I want to use for something. A few of them may grow to be  bigger pieces to cut into several blocks.




Most of these 8 1/2 inch blocks look  like yellow blocks even though here are small amounts of other colors. Most of them were finished and trimmed to size. The 4 blocks on the left in the top row were incomplete and I decided that I would finish them. They asked me for orange strips and I obliged.
It was after I finished them and put them on my design wall that I saw that they were orange and the other blocks were yellow. I had formerly thought of them all as "citrus".  These are still on my design wall and I am thinking about what I want to do with them and what I will need to make to go with them.

Everything else is put away again in the storage cube. It is sorted in away that I know I can work with. There is one bag that didn't make it back to the cube. For now it will go into the laundry basket under my cutting table "to be addressed".  I  still have a long way to go in order to make my space more workable.  I have one project that is near completion but has been set on hold until I can decide on borders and backing; it is a need to finish project with a deadline.

Only things that are needed will  be worked on for the time being, All large goals are being put off or abandoned.  I need to make changes in my sewing room that will result in not having to move furniture in order accomplish ordinary tasks, like cutting and pressing.  I need to have most of my supplies where I can reach them without standing on a ladder or digging them out of a closet in another room.

Who knows where this will lead? 

I might end up with a more usable sewing space 

or even a guest room or TV room.

Pink

Last Saturday, I went to our quilting group at church where some of the ladies were sorting through a very large shopping bag of donated scraps.  I hadn't brought anything with me to work on so I went to work helping them. The fabric donor has given us an enormous amount of fabric before this and it is all wonderful quilt shop fabric, some large pieces, some half yards, some fat quarters; it is all washed and pressed. This bag was an assortment of colors and sizes, all jumbled up together. It was like digging into a treasure trove. One of the ladies was looking for "I Spy" pieces and found  a lot of them; the pink scraps caught my attention. I had finished with some orange and yellow improv scrap blocks from my own scrap and was ready for another color. PINK!! 

I started sorting the scraps I brought home and at one point I had a little pile that called out to become a block.

This is the block I made. 

Everything else I was doing got put on hold as I trimmed and cut squares from the scraps and then going through my bins and cutting squares from smallish pieces.

So, I have been energized to tackle  the bins of pieces and parts that are taking up space I am focused on cutting for a few specific patterns that use random scraps.  I  have stacks of cut squares, random strips sorted, by color, into my scrap bins, a big bag of dog bed scraps, and a few empty boxes.

Maybe one day 

I will have a sewing space 

where I can work  without frustration.  

We'll see.

Progress

I layered up the baby quilt and I am all ready to quilt it. First I have to decide if I can use the thread I have or if I need to shop. I want to use variegated thread with the serpentine stitch in the center of the sashing and I am not sure if what I have is right for it.

This is a sample of the 2 choices I have in mind (and in my thread stash). Maybe I am getting too obsessive about the thread.

The layered up quilt is here, on top of 3 empty boxes, on the table under my small design wall.
I am changing out the quilts on my design boards on the walls as a way of keeping my level of enthusiasm on HIGH.















This is the other progress I made yesterday. Those three boxes all held scraps, most of them sorted and in zip lock bags.  In the forefront on the  right are the HST's from the connector corners on the wedding quilt. Some are pressed open and trimmed but most of them still need to be pressed. It is a tedious job.
The shoe box in the back and one tray under the white tray with triangles, both hold the scraps I have been using for the baby quilt. These will soon be sorted by color and will go in the general scrap basket. The progress I made on these is getting them out of hiding  to work on.


I bought these 2 flexible laundry basket/hamper type things for all my Ziploc bags of color sorted scraps. They are stacked up here but 2 of them will fit side by side under my table.

In the year since we moved I have become more and more discouraged about working in my sewing room.
I am grateful to have a room just for sewing but I have never really hit the mark on organizing it so it is an easy space in which to work.

Keeping my art work (quilts) where I can look at them is something I need.

Working out a way to have a bigger, better design wall and making my supplies more accessible is a major necessity. Consolidating my scraps and putting them where it is easy to access is a big step in the right direction. This is going to be a work in progress for a while. I need to do some sewing for a while and think things over before making more costly decisions than the purchase of 2 plastic scrap baskets.

The Reason I Can't

One of the reasons I can't get my sewing space cleaned up is that I keep pulling more things out of boxes and baskets.
When I was looking for the blue print fabric for the star quilt I found these 2 blocks in the scrap box. The one on the right was finished but the other was in 4 parts. I took them out of the scrap box and set them aside to put away in the "odd block" box. Of course before I but them away I had to sew that one block together.

I was starting to put everything away where it belongs and I found a number of pieces and parts leftover from the Mary Ellen Hopkins challenge quilt. I decided to sew the odds and ends together into blocks so I could put them in the odd block box.

My odd block box is the largest box on my shelf. I have the feeling that if I ever decide to make an "Everything But" quilt it will have to be more than one quilt. I am afraid to really take a good look at the contents of that box.

These baskets are on top of my bookcase. Once upon a time I bought 7 of these baskets to keep on a shelf with current projects. Somehow that got out of hand because the shelf was high and when I was set up to machine quilt they were not easy to reach. I reorganized and four of the baskets were used elsewhere.
On top of my book case, these 3 baskets are reachable and they hold leftover parts from recent quilts and some halfway current projects. This is where I found the parts from the Mary Ellen quilt. All of the leftovers that are not in those odd blocks I just made, will now go into the general scraps that are sorted by color. One of the remaining baskets holds the HST scrap quilt I was working on before I started the Fresh Cut quilt. It is really amazing that it is nicely sorted and ready to be worked on.

I am afraid to look in the other basket!

I will do it....

 but I will wait  until I have everything cleaned up and put away.

But what if............ 

 there is something in that basket

that needs to be put away

 in the same place as the other stuff I have to put away?

Sometimes you have to stop and sew

It took me several days to get back to straightening up the sewing room. When I got around to it I decided it was time for a major cleanup and rearrangement. Jack and I moved a large cabinet from it's original place, a few feet from the door, to a corner where it should have been in the first place. It opens up the room and if that were the only change it would be worth the effort. I had to empty the cabinet in order to move it; while everything was out I went through all the contents and discarded a few things and set other things aside to go to storage in the basement. That gave me the incentive to go through everything in the room( I really mean everything)  desk drawers, bookcase, sewing chests, boxes, shelves, yes.... everything. When you put things away haphazardly just to get it put away, it gets to a place where it is impossible to find anything. I was there!

I am not finished yet; this is a table of stuff that has to be put away. There is also a bunch of stuff in the hallway that is not coming back in this room. When we moved I reached a point where I couldn't decide whether or not to get rid of some things; a lot of it came along with us. I am much more objective now about what I really want to keep.
However, sometimes you just have to stop, clear a bit of space, and sew.








 There were two finished blocks on the design wall (yep, I now have a design wall of sorts) and two blocks ready to be stitched together. I sewed the 2 blocks together and put the four blocks up on the wall in this arrangement. This is not what  I thought I wanted originally But the real life version looks a bit different than the EQ version. I am going to wait and see how it looks when I get all of the blocks made before I decide which I like better.

These are two mock ups using photos of the four blocks to see the pattern that would develop. I thought the pattern below would be too static but in actual fabric I see how much variety there is of color and pattern .   I will wait and see which I  like best.
Actually there are several other variations that I saw and eliminated when I was playing and manipulating the blocks in EQ. I might revisit those before I make up my mind.



Meanwhile it is back to making order out of chaos. It really has to be done! The way things have been, I have not been able to work in this room and sustain my interest in anything.

Same old story

 Yesterday we cleaned up the quilting closet at church and  put everything back in place. We consolidated and purged and hung some things with command hooks. Everything we use often should be easy to get out and more important easy to put away.  

  So......Here I am again organizing my own sewing space. It seems like I just did this last month. Oh wait, I did do this last month. Actually this time it is different; Jack took one of my shelf units out to the garage. That means I have to be serious about deciding what I can realistically keep and what has to go. This picture shows my one shelf unit loaded with what I am keeping. I was able to hang 11 quilts (no bed quilts) in the closet using some skirt/pants hangers that hold them securely and are not bulky so the hangers themselves do not take up a lot of space. I am going to buy some more like it for my clothes closet and to hang a few more quilts in this closet. It is also time to let go of a few more quilts.  I am not going to post a picture of the rest of the room right now because it is a mess and who wants to look at another mess. There are a lot of things that need to go in other places and that means I will finally have to tackle the hall closet and do some purging there. I will not be posting any photos about that either.

I had a lot of wall hangings rolled up together around batting covered cardboard tubes. That worked pretty well but I ran out of space to store them conveniently. The last time I cleaned my sewing closet I took out 3 large rolls of quilts and I have been moving them around from the living room sofa to my bed, depending on whether we expected company or not. They are almost all hanging in the closet now. I unrolled them on my bed to put them on the hangers and Jack was sitting at his computer watching me. I likes this cat quilt and said I should hang it. He jokingly suggested the ceiling as there is really no more available wall space. It is 24 inches square and I am going to hang it in my sewing room. I have some things on my bulletin boards that I can change out.

This is a quilt I made for a guild challenge. We blindly chose a crayon from a paper bag and that was the predominate color we were to use. Tan is not my favorite color; it is a color I would never, ever choose. Guess what, I really came to like this quilt and the way the colors came together. I guess we all need to stretch a bit now and again.

Another finish

I finished another one of my circle projects. This was what I started out to do when we embarked on the circle challenge. My inspiration was the "Rosies" from Diana Hire's book "Quilter's Playtime". Mine didn't look so much like the Rosies in the book, maybe because I didn't read all the instructions. There were some other people who  started out making Rosies but they didn't bring them to our final circle show and tell so maybe they didn't finish them either.

I consider this finished even though I have to finish stitch half of one sleeve down on the back. My left hand thumb and wrist were so painful that I gave it up for the day. When I am done I will block it to make it nice and square. I think I will  also put some beads or something around the center as I did not cover my edges as well  as I thought. I  wanted the center irregular and the background showing through but I didn't do a really good job with my satin stitching. This is about 24 inches square and the background is more pink than yellow. I quilted with purple and metallic gold thread with lines radiating out from the wedges.  Best thing I can say about it is that it is done (well almost).

Today I am meeting a friend from our church quilting group and we are cleaning out the quilting closet at church. It is a mess. We are not the only group who uses that closet but we have the largest area and it needs to be organized.

I have also been organizing some more at home. This is a picture of my closet right now. I have had, as my goal reclaiming some space and getting rid of one shelf unit so I can hang things in the other half of the closet. This is as far as I got. Jack is going to take the  one shelf unit out today and then I will put everything back. I consolidated and purged and maybe this time I will be able to keep it under control. 

We'll see! 

All cleaned up

I've spent the better part of the last 6 days going through all the boxes in my sewing room closet and the drawers in  the little chest next to my sewing machine.

It all started when I moved 2 little stacking sets of drawers to the bathroom from my sewing room. I needed to clean up the clutter in the one and only drawer in the vanity. I got along without these in my sewing room before I bought them and everything I had in them I had kept in another place before I got them. I wouldn't miss them. Oh really?????

One thing lead to another and before I knew it my room was total chaos. I thought I would go though things at a leisurely pace and put each thing back after I put it in order and I would maintain control over things.
Well, that didn't happen! Why did I think this time would be any different?  This is what I have done ever since  I was a kid and my mother made me clean up my room. I get started and then there are things in the wrong drawers or boxes and I have to get out the right box and that leads to another box to put something else away and so it goes.



Eventually, there was no place to sit and almost nowhere to walk. Of course all that dragging things out and the resulting disorder wore me out and I would have to go and rest. I even took some naps. This morning I could stand it no longer I made up my mind to keep at it until I had ORDER.



That was then



This is now

I can sit down on any one of 3 chairs, I have a neat stack of things that I can get to and finish, my closet shelves have neat and orderly boxes that only have in them what they are supposed to have, I have one box that holds interfacing instead of bits and pieces in several  places, the same for stabilizers, and fusible web. I have a stack of things that I will never, ever use again (some of them I never used even once) and a box of books that I won't look at again; they are going, going, soon to be gone. There are 4 bags of rubbish waiting to be taken down to the trash room. I have one overflowing box of scraps to be sorted and made ready to use. They were in several small containers here and there because ???  I'm not sure why they were all over the place.

This is a good beginning.



I found so much stuff that made no sense to hold on to and as I began to start putting things away I got more and more ruthless about hanging on to something I might use in some weird circumstance. ( Let me tell you it is hard to be ruthless when your name is Ruth). I am going to go through my desk and my bookcase  and purge old papers and junk. I have a row of magazine holders on the bottom shelf of my bookcase that has so much stuff that I don't remember anyway when I need it and whole shelf of notebooks that was once an orderly way to keep things but has mostly become a useless redundant mess. I am going to go slowly this time, really, and get it all done.

But first.................

I am going to sew!







Back to Organizing

Yesterday I spent most of the day getting everything  except my desk and bookcase moved around just to  make it easy (not to mention safe) to work on sorting and purging. I took my sewing machine out of the sewing table and raised the shelf it sits on to make the top flat for another horizontal surface. I raised one of my 2 foot x 4 foot tables to match the height of the other one and moved it so they are at right angles. With the table raised to a new height I can put my little blanket chest underneath and make room under the window to put my little sewing chest and stack things I am finished sorting. Did you catch the word FINISHED. I am making progress.

The large box holds all kinds of blocks from years of demos for classes. They are all bagged up by size etc. I wish I had tackled this box before THE RACE I would have used a lot of them for prizes. The box on the top of it is full of blocks that I actually plan to make into quilts. The other 2 boxes are 1.5 and 2 inch log cabin strips that I sorted last evening while watching  NCIS reruns. On the floor next to the chest  is a stack of empty boxes. Yeah!

This is one  of the big problems in my sewing room.It looks untidy no matter how I try to make it look neat. It also takes up a space I could use  more efficiently. Not sure what it would be because it is one of those things that I never move. Most of that stuff I could do without. The bottom 2 shelves are papers that I put into different notebooks and magazine holders. I could probably get rid of almost everything on the bottom shelf and all but 2 or 3 of the notebooks. I am not going to get into that now however as it will be a "whole 'nother mess" when I do.

This is one little area of my sewing room that is pretty much in order, a little oasis of calm. I really need to have this to look at as I walk by or into my room. 

The snow has arrived and I will be staying in all day so I am planning on another long working session. I do have quilting tomorrow with my church group  so I am hoping the streets have been plowed and are passable by then. If not maybe I will have to stay home.

We'll see.