The forecast for Saturday was for snow, sleet, some ice then rain.

A perfect day for spending some time in my sewing room.   So that’s where I headed.  What should I work on?   I took out some fabric for some plate cozies and worked on them for a bit.   However,  even after doing the post-holiday clean up,  I still had lots of piles/small bins of scraps around that were totally not organized and they were staring at me.   I find that I enjoy my time at my sewing machine more if the area around me is fairly neat and organized.

So I got my rotary cutter and ruler out and my iron turned on and I set to work to organize and tame my growing scrap monster.   I decided to start out by simply separating the scraps into two different categories…… longer strips and squares/rectangles.   Then I opened a bin and was surprised to find a project that I had started a while back and had forgotten about.  It was a whole bunch of tumbler pieces that I had cut as well as 4 rows of tumblers that I had already sewn together.  It was from a Bonnie Hunter leader/ender challenge from last year?  The year before?  I don’t remember now.  But I did recall what my idea was for this quilt.  I was going to call it Tumbling Seasons and cut tumblers in four different groups:   Fall, Winter, Spring and Summer.  I have obviously only gotten the Fall tumblers worked on.   I got all the tumbler pieces pulled out of the bin and ironed them and the strips and put them all neatly back into their own bin.  I need to see how many rows I get out of what I’ve already cut, add more if needed and then I will work on the other three seasons.

Ahhhh,  but I am getting ahead of myself.  There was still the matter of the rest of those scraps awaiting my attention.  At the end of the afternoon,  I had gone through seven of the bins of scraps.   I didn’t get to the two bins of flannel scraps that were up on the shelf in the closet or three with cotton fabric.  I ended up with three bins emptied out and four bins of fabric pressed and organized and ready for further organization into color groups.  Then I will need to decide whether to  have one bin for each color or combine colors like blue and green, red and pink, etc.   I suppose that decision will be made by how much of each color group I have.   Sizes and shapes will need to be determined also.  I know I will keep some as strips because I want to try a making some strip blocks.    I will need to go back and read  Bonnie Hunter’s Scrap Users Systems’ suggestions again to see what the best sizes for the rest of it would be.

Three more small shoe box size bins to go through.  Although I am pretty sure I have a larger bin of scraps hiding somewhere.   But I’ll not worry about that one just yet.

It was a good day’s work.  No sewing or organizing happened in the sewing room the rest of the weekend or today.  I will be back there tomorrow doing some actual sewing.   I will take the bin with the tumblers over to my sewing machine and use them as my leaders/enders  while sewing and get two projects worked on at the same time.   Love it!

I hope you all had a good weekend.   January always has me thinking about organizing, re-organizing,  de-cluttering, etc.   Do you have those same thoughts?  Are you working on any particular room/closet?  Besides my focus in my sewing room, we are also working on going through “stuff” in closets.    Good luck with your clearing out projects if you have any.   I’d love to hear about your progress and if you found any forgotten about items or projects like I did with the tumblers.

Keep warm.  Stay cozy.   See you soon.

Bye for now.

Ginny