Joining the 2020 RSC

What a week it’s been! Last Saturday I decided I would join the RSC challenge and make something from my orange scraps. I love orange fabric and thought there should be plenty of scraps to work with, I just had to find them. Thus began a nearly week long reorganization of my stash, especially my scraps.

I had three large bins stuffed to the brim with scraps, and I do mean stuffed. No organization, no order whatsoever. And I was having a very hard time finding anything useful in orange. I was having a hard time finding any orange. So I abandoned the plan to make something until I had established some order to my scraps. I knew I had to get them out of the bins and into something else. I had plastic stacking drawers that were not very organized either and decided to empty them and use them for my scraps, each drawer could hold a different color, or two or three related colors.

This bin was the worst and most embarrassing. Most of it was unusable shreds I saved to put out for the birds to use for nesting material. No more. I love the birds but they can find their own supplies.

It took a couple of days to get everything in those bins sorted and put in a labeled drawer. While I was at it I decided to move my project boxes to a more accessible location in the closet. That meant some rearranging of what was in the closet. First of all the scrap drawers needed to go in the closet. And that couldn’t happen until a lot of things unrelated to quilting had to be moved out of the closet and out of the sewing room.

While making room for my project boxes (pictured left) I pulled down a large box that was only labeled “fabric.” It was stuffed with fabric and scraps from my mother-in-law’s studio that I saved for my stash when we moved in 2017. I hadn’t touched it since moving in. Well it was a treasure trove of fabric and scraps and took another two days to wash, sort through and get put away in the appropriate bins and drawers.

On Wednesday my friend Kathy and I took a road trip to a fabric store we had just found out about. More on that for another post perhaps.

Finally on Thursday I was able to get some orange scraps out and made the little piece pictured at the top of this post. My first practice quilting for my elephant quilt had not gone well so I needed another sample to work on and I had barely enough orange scraps to put that little piece together. My second attempt at quilting that simple pattern went much better and I think I will use it to quilt the elephant after all. See my post The Elephant in the Room.

Yesterday I cut more fabric, some of which was orange, for the Roman Square quilt which is my OMG for February. Finally, today I finished sewing the blocks for that quilt. See my post On the Design Wall.

Don’t know if I will get anything else done in orange this month, though I think I will try. Also, since I’m joining late I have catching up to do to cover the green for January. There was loads of green fabric in the big fabric box from Mom’s studio so I have plenty to work with.

I’m linking up with Rainbow Scrap Challenge 2020 at https://superscrappy.blogspot.com/p/rsc19.html 

I’m linking up with One Monthly Goal at Elm Street Quilts at https://www.elmstreetquilts.com/2020/02/one-monthly-goal-february-link-up.html