Good Start to the Year

 January has been a good start to my personal goals for the year. I've pretty much decluttered all the areas I wanted to declutter. I've always got a donation box going, so I'll toss things in there as I come across things I can pass on, but my major declutter is done. I was writing on the calendar how many things I got rid of each day, and my January total is 529 Items donated, 4 trash bags full and 2 boxes of things I didn't count individually. I really wanted to get to 500 items, and I passed that so it's a win! 

This was a no-buy month for me, and I did well on that too. Every time I thought of something I wanted, I put it on a list, and by the end of of the month, aside from a couple of grocery items, I only had one thing left on my list. What happened to the other things? I found stuff during my declutter that could be repurposed and made buying unnecessary. 

Here's a good example of that. I've been wanting a basket to store my onions in, to keep them away from the potatoes. My potatoes were sprouting too quickly near the onions. When I was decluttering the sewing room, I came across this basket which works fine for the onions.

I usually have far more onions in the house, the basket was full when I moved it to the kitchen. Onions are on my grocery list 😉

The one thing that stayed on my list, I broke no-buy for and picked it up at the thrift store I was dropping stuff off at. 

The plastic basket I used to keep my quilting tools in in my living room craft corner broke, and I needed something to put my tools and a couple small rulers into. The basket was probably 20 years old, so it wasn't really a surprise it broke. I had found something on Amazon that would work for just under $20, I wanted something that looked a little nicer than what I had. I looked around the thrift store for something that would work, and I found this.

Yes, I broke no-buy for it, but it was $8 instead of $20. The only other time I broke no-buy this month was when I suggested DH and I get to-go coffee on a daytrip to his sister's house. I, of course, paid all the bills, and took my turns paying for lunch when my sister and I go out each week, but that was a given. 

I reverse meal planned all month, starting my meal planning with stuff I already had. I managed to skip grocery shopping all together one week, and had two weeks of only spending $60, which with today's grocery prices I thought was great. I'm going to continue the pantry/freezer cleanout into February. DH won't complain a bit about that, he's been eating well, homemade pot pie, homemade soups (we love soup), Korean BBQ fried rice, gumbo, chili, spaghetti, etc...

In the evenings I've been tackling the backlog of fabric scraps. Since I just found all the quilt blocks I have made, I'm cutting whatever I need from the scraps to get those blocks into quilts.

I like the Dancing Nine Patch setting, so I've cut the scraps of several widebacks into the sashing for these quilts. I've also been cutting a lot of larger scraps into hourglass blocks for alternate blocks to go with the blocks I've already got. I'm sewing up the alternate blocks and sewing the sashings on the day after I cut them. I haven't been taking photos much, But I have assembled a lot of quilt tops this month, and my piles of quilt blocks are going down. Smaller scraps I'm cutting for the scrap user system. 

 I've cut some borders out of the scraps for quilts that need them. I found a group of scraps that work really well together, so I am going to cut one new quilt from those, but I will add some other scraps from my scrap user system to the new scraps, and the pattern I'm going to use need no background or borders, so it's a great scrap buster. 

I still have a lot more scraps to process.

This is the basket I keep for scraps at my cutting table, and yes, it's still full, a bit over-filled in fact. When I started processing scraps I could have filled this basket three times with all the scraps that were tossed all over the fabric room. I've got to have another basting spree, so I'm going to be making more scraps from making backings. I'm hoping to have an empty scrap basket by the end of March. Yes, it will fill up again, but if I can empty it, it won't be so overwhelming, and I am much better about using scraps when they are pre-cut. 

My other January goal was exercise, and I exercised 4-5 times per week which was my goal. 

So what's up for February? Now that my fabric room is cleaned up, I'm going to trash it by going through all the batting scraps and piecing Frankenbatting. I haven't tackled batting scraps in a couple years, so it's a huge undertaking. I'm going to be basting quilts too, so I'm not even sure I'll finish that in February. I'm almost done quilting another quilt, so most of my basting pins are free. I need to get another pile of quilts basted, and if I can use Frankenbatting for a bunch of those, it will help clear out space in my quilt closet. Piecing batting is not my favorite thing to do, but saving money on batting is something I do like, so it's worth it. It's also not that hard to do, I just procrastinate on doing it too long so I have a ridiculous amount of batting scraps to deal with. I don't mind piecing Warm and Natural, so I have pieced quite a bit of that for table runners and such, but the poly batting? Not much fun piecing that. I've debating switching to only using Warm and Natural batting, but with the number of quilts I tend to make, I can't afford to do that. Someday, if I find myself quilting less, I likely will make the switch. 

Since we didn't have any travel planned for the first quarter of the year, I really wanted to tackle the stuff I've been putting off, and set myself up for a successful year. If I can do as well in February, as I did in January, it will be great!