Taming the scraps

This is what I use to store my random quilting stuff. The bigger drawers have my scraps, sorted by size, smallest in the top drawer, largest in the bottom drawer. The smaller drawers hold random things like paper patterns, rotary blades, charm packs, fat quarter bundles, a quilt cut out but not assembled, fabric for a quilt yet to be cut out, thread, sewing machine feet, pins, safety pins... I keep my yardage, and fabric bought for specific projects, stored elsewhere.

I decided it was high time to do something with the scraps, as it's getting hard to slide the drawers, they are so full... Help came in two forms. 

The first was a Christmas present! Welcome to my home, Accuquilt Go! fabric cutter. I've been waiting for you for a long time.

The second was a book. I've had this since the summer, and have looked through it on several occasions, but am now actually putting it to use.

I started with the drawer that has my smallest pieces in it; leftovers from other projects, teeny bits and pieces, but not so small that I could justify throwing them away. I just reached in and pulled out whatever scrap was on top of the pile.

If the scrap was large enough to cover any of the die shapes on the fabric cutter, I cut it. If not, it went into a different pile to be sorted later by color. 

These are the new shapes I now have, just from that one drawer. Lots of half square triangles, and two sizes of squares. Two half square triangles fit together to make the smaller size square, and four of the smaller squares equals the size of the larger square, so they can all be mixed and matched into a scrap quilt.  Then it was on to sorting the smaller bits by color.

 
Here are a few of the new mounds, sorted by color. You can see purple, blue, red, cream/pale yellow, orange/bright yellow, and pink. There was also a pile each of brown, black, white, and green. Sorting these was difficult at times, as quite a bit of my fabric is brightly multi-colored, leftover from making I spy quilts.

Once sorted, it was on to the book instructions, and piecing the fabric scraps back together to make "slabs" of one color family.

These are my slabs of black, 12" square. I don't have a lot of plain black. I'm drawn to brights on blacks, and my scraps reflect that. It took almost all of my black scraps to make these two slabs. The rest goes back in the drawer for next time. What a great way to use up the leftovers.