One thing I've noticed while I've been doing Scrapping Saturdays over the last two months (results to be posted in the future) is that it takes me forever to find what I want to use for my projects in the bin, which is just a big jumbled tangle of fabric strips, scraps, blocks and pieces. It took me an hour to dig out enough strips to piece a quilt top last night during a one-day challenge, which finally covinced me to spend today sorting the bin. It took a whole afternoon, but now everything is sorted, folded, bagged together and labeled. No more mess, and I can find what I need straight away.
I save nearly all of my fabric scraps from sewing, quilting and texile art projects so I can reuse them. Often I do as patchwork for crazy quilt projects or stitch practice pieces. This is the bag in my sewing room that holds them. Here's a sample of what's in the bag: the trimmed legs from a pair of thrifted capris I altered into shorts, some fabric trimmed from some backing, a piece of cross stitch fabric leftover from framing the thrifted Santa piece, and a short length of ribbon, also from Christmas. Once my scrap bag is full I empty it into my scraps bin here. If you think having an entire bin of scraps is a bit much, keep in mind that I gave away two other bins of scrap fabric I had saved last year to the local quilting guild. :) Here's my problem: the scraps bin is full now, and I either have to start another bin, or devote more time to using up my scraps. Since I'm still trying not to hoard fabric, I'm going to take one night a week to ...