Scrapbusting

My scrap user system had gotten huge, and if you had asked me how long it would take to sew it up into quilts I likely would have said a couple years. Usually I'm really good about turning over the scraps regularly, but since I've had so many wedding quilts and a focus on UFO's I just wasn't using scraps like I normally do. Well, I am surprising myself on how fast my strips are being converted into quilt blocks. Granted, I am only doing easy patterns, and I haven't actually finished any quilts from this scrapbusting spree yet, but I did get the first quillow top together today. 

I've got so many piles of blocks in my sewing room, I decided I need to get some tops assembled. Tops I can put on a hanger in the closet, and basically be completely out of my way. Before I can sew up quilt tops, I have to figure out layouts. 

This looks like one big quilt in the photo, but it's actually two quillow tops on two separate design boards. The one on the right is the one I sewed into a top today. I've even laid out another on the empty design board. These look better in person than in the photo. I'm doing monochromatic tops for the quillows just because it's a quick way to bust scraps, and it busts the most scraps possible, I'm not using any background or constant, it's 100% scraps. I am specifically thinking about car use for the quillows, and you don't need anything fancy for that. These will make a fun game of I Spy though. I had so many novelty scraps, these tops have Batman, Superman, Spiderman, and Thor fabric, Air Force, Navy, and Army fabrics, multiple sports fabrics, cartoon characters, land and sea animals, holidays, lots to keep kids entertained with an I Spy game in the car. 

Blue was the most popular request for quillows. The two dark blue quillows will go to grandsons, the light blue was requested for one of my granddaughters, and I need to come up with another blue one for another granddaughter. I'm going to have to make the next blue quillow from a different sized strip though. 

I laid out the purple/pink rail fence. I think it will be a cute baby quilt. This one will not be a quillow. 

I have enough blocks sewn up for 3 blue quillows (one of which is now a top and the other two are on the design wall), 1 red, 1 pink, 2 green, and 1 purple. I also have other sized blocks sewn up for regular quilts. Today I was working on figuring out if I needed more of any blocks to have a good layout. I ended up making 1 more of one style block, and 20 more of a different style. Tomorrow my goal is to sew up at least one quilt top, and maybe figure out plans for some of my other stack of blocks, and make any more blocks for at least one of those if necessary. 

I'm still sub-cutting strips a little along. I'm finding my arm does best with short sessions of cutting and ironing, so I'm interspersing those activities throughout my day, no marathon sessions. 

It's been an eventful week, and I've had a lot of unexpected things come up, so I haven't gotten back to quilting on that UFO. I need to though, the new queen's list came out and I'm number 38 now. If the UFO Challenge stays the same as usual, I should have over a month before I am queen, but I'd like to get this quilt done and drop down to the bottom of the list long before that. The UFO I plan to quilt after this will just get meandering, so it will go a lot faster than this one.

Life has been an adventure lately, but it feels pretty good to be using up my scraps in the down times.