Bicycle Clips

Being a Gadget Girl I have, among a zillion other quilting gadgets, a set of bicycle-type clips for securing a rolled quilt when quilting on a domestic machine. I have to say I have not found them that useful and I usually scrunch the quilt up while I am quilting. Last week I was able to use Janice's Swiftquilter and Juki to quilt my "Night Metropolis" quilt. The Swiftquilter does not have a fourth roller for the batting and at the beginning of the quilting process the excess hangs on the ground. I had a bright idea! Roll it up over a spare curtain rood and secure it with the bicycle clips. It worked pretty good:
Yes, I confess, that batting is leftover pieces sewn together. Yes, I joined the pieces with the sewing machine. Yes, I realise the quilt may not be all that flat (in fact I will be very surprised if if is flat). Well, it is a scrap quilt!

I am heading out to Janice's again tomorrow to finish off the quilting on "Night Metropolis". I think I've got carried away with the amount of quilting on it. I've done all the 'windows' and I need to go back and quilt the 'attic' frame part. I'd better head off to bed early then. What? It's 11.41 pm already? Oh well, at least I still have one week of holidays to go :-)

See what I mean?

I made a few of these string blocks a while back (like about over a year ago - see April 13 post. One day when I am not too tired I'll learn how to do that link thingy with the time stamp)
I have finally got around to trimming them all and here they are, up all stacked up and ready to go:
Guess what?
Yep,
More scraps!

See what I mean?

I was really, really strong, I moved them from the cutting table to a plastic bag. The plastic bag hasn't made it to the bin yet, but it's a start, right? I haven't yet retrieved a single piece - emphasis on yet :-)

Scrap Useage

I have started to make inroads on the scrap collection. I've made this quilt top using crumb blocks which I cut to 4 1/2" and put in an attic window setting:
The quilt is quite large, 1.5 metres by 2 metres, and has 140 blocks (10 blocks by 14). I'm calling it "Night Metropolis". It is school holidays right now and I am going out to my good friend Janice's tomorrow. I will start quilting it on her Juki and Swiftquilter. I had better have a good think about how I want to quilt it in the next 12 hours.

I found the crumb blocks really relaxing to make and quite addictive. Sadly, the scrap collection doesn't look any smaller! I think I've got enough scraps to make about a million crumb blocks.

Drowning in Scraps

I guess I am no different from most quilters, I have HEAPS of scraps. This is my scrap corner:
Everything you see here is scraps. Everything on the shelves are scraps, in the white plastic ice cream containers, in the orange photocopy paper box lids, in the boxes on the floor. They have been starting to overwhelm me. I cannot bring myself to throw any of them out. I hear my father's voice echoing in my head "waste not, want not". I have been keeping pieces as little as 1" by 1/2" for goodness sake! One of my friends says I have 'scrap-a-philia' and I need therapy. Another asked one of her on-line groups what they did with their scraps. Thankfully (for me), of everyone who replied, only one threw out her scraps. the others are like me, they keep them. It is reassuring to know I am not alone :-)