Barbara's Scrap Bag

My good friend Barbara has been a quilter for many years. Actually she considers herself more of a crafter than a quilter, and she loves to make purses and bags, outfits for her grandkids, things like that. 

Like any good quilter, Barbara dutifully saved all her scraps for years, thinking that one day she might make a scrap quilt like so many of us do. Even though scrappy quilts have never really been her thing, she finally did try some different projects but was unhappy with her efforts. 

Recently, with destashing in mind, she finally decided to throw in the towel on scraps, and I became the very happy recipient of a kitchen-sized bag of her scraps. Lovely scraps, larger pieces, newer lines, not calicos and such. Her taste in fabrics is not as eclectic as mine, but there is still plenty of variety and appeal. 

I sorted her bag into color groupings as I considered what I might do with them. I finally decided to take a recent note from Bonnie Hunter's blog; and rather than cut them up into squares, rectangles and strips for the scrap bins, I decided to challenge myself to actually use them up in a series of quilts. 

My only rule for the challenge is to make as few quilts as possible out of the scraps. That might be a 3 or 4, or it might be 20, if that's what it takes. I have no timeline in mind, and I may work on them here and there in between other projects, or I may sit down and plug away at one in particular. I'm also allowing myself the latitude of adding my own scraps to the mix to make a quilt the size I want, but I plan to use up Barbara's first if possible. No rules, save the one.

There is a tab at the top of my blog now to list the quilts I'm working on, have finished, or thinking about.The first one is already in the works.