i love my scrapbox

I've said in the past, on flickr, that I love my scrapbox. I have a printer paper box with a lid full of scraps. They have come from many places. My own sewing, quilt friends near and far (you know who you are), friend's mother's and grandmother's bits of stash, my own mother's hand me down scraps. My mother even gave me a shoe box full of 2" strips that she used for making log cabins. She said she was tired of them. And between you and me, I can see why! There are some ugly strips in there.



I like to create from my scrap box. It is like a treasure hunt to dump the box out and go searching for fun pieces. I create "wonky" log cabins from my scrap box mostly (here is a tutorial - not original but how I do it). But I have also created some of my smaller quilts almost entirely from my box. I love to use lots of fabrics when making something. Why use a fabric twice and definitely not three times in the same quilt. The more the merrier in my book. I love the scrappy look.

And I think I realized recently why I love my scrapbox so much. There is none of that "unfold a piece of fabic, iron it, cut what you need, fold it back up nicely, put it away nicely - repeat again and again and again....". I dump my box, dig, find what i want, maybe iron it, cut a bit off or use the whole thing, and throw the unused piece if there is any back into the pile on my bed, and stuff the whole mess back into the box when I'm done. And sometimes when I'm working from my box, I will take some of the bigger pieces and just cut strips from them and toss them back in so that they will be ready to use. A small part of me wants to slice up my whole stash! But that wouldn't really be using my scraps now would it? So I guess I will stick with my current set up.

My biggest goal right now is making a wonky scrappy I spy log cabin quilt out of my scraps. If you sew for any children in your life, you will have left over bits of usable i spy pieces for the centers, but you probably have lots of "leftover" pieces that no one wants to spy. Frog legs, horse butts, butterfly wings, puppy tails etc. Here is where you can use them up! I just slice all those leftover bits into "logs" for my cabins. So you can spy the centers and bits of other things too!


here you can see the cat and chicken, but do you also see the aligator, frog, cherries, stars and fish? None of those extra strips were big enough for anything, until now!

here is my quilt so far:



My box is getting quite full - stuffed to the gills is more like it. So my dear friends, I may in the near future, offer up small little envelopes of scraps to you for free! If there is any interest. And under the condition that you may get a few uglies in the mix. And that you may not send me anything! What do you think?




******important notice**********
You may have notice already, but if you haven't you will. I must confess, that I am horrible about responding to comments. I could say that I get too many to respond to - ha! not true. I could pretend that I'm too busy with life to get back to you. Again, not true. I mean, life is busy, but we are all busy and it is all about priorities anyway. The truth is........I'm a big fat lazy butt. It's true and you should know that. I do read my comments. I love my comments from you. And I do check you all out and see what you are up to on your blogs. And if I there is something that needs to be answered that is asked in the comments I will answer it at the end of the next post. Ok? Just so you know before we get to far in this relationship, I'm a lousy responder. Still like me?