Adventures in Fabric

The great thing about being home from college for almost a month is that I've finally had time to get some quilting done without homework, deadlines, and other things getting in the way. I've been working on a full-size quilt for my bed, and now, after nearly six and a half years, I'm thrilled to announce.... I'm still working on it. There's nothing quite like sitting under a quilt on a cold day with a hot cup of tea, while your cat pounces on your feet and anything else underneath the quilt. But that's for another blog post...

I made this quilted bag recently as a Christmas present
for a friend. Quilted bags are a great way to use up all those old fabric scraps you might have sitting around from other projects. They're also a fun way to practice or learn how to hand quilt, if you don't already know how. Here
are the instructions, although you can piece the front and back of the bag any way you'd like (or whichever way uses up the most scraps).

Speaking of fabric scraps, I've recently settled on a way to deal with all of my own fabric scraps. It really makes me come unraveled to have piles of unused fabric scraps sitting around my room. Instead of randomly stuffing my leftover bits of material in bags where they'll sit unused forever (not that I would ever do that...), I've been cutting them into squares for a future quilt. I cut them into 1.5", 2", 2.5", and 3.5" squares, which can all be pieced together into 6.5" blocks. It really takes up a lot less space to store scraps as quilt squares rather than a giant heap.

Bits of material for stuffing

I use any scraps smaller than 1.5" for cardmaking, and I set the tiniest bits aside to use as stuffing for other projects later. So far, I've only make a small dent in the random pieces of fabric that seem to be floating around every single room of the house.

Sew much fabric, sew little time...

A pile of fabric scraps...

...turned into useful quilt blocks.

Do you like sewing? What projects are you currently working on?