2010 Final Countdown Task Three

OK, Rosa, your wait is over . . .

Are you all ready?

You’re all doing great so far.

Some of you are putting me to shame!

Here’s the final task in the 2010 Final Countdown.

And it is:

Deal with a bunch of scrap

I said “scrap”, not “crap”, OK?

You know when you finish a quilt, and you have leftovers, and you just toss them in a pile and tell yourself you’ll do something with them later?

Or you buy a random fat quarter or two and just don’t ever find a spot to put them away, and you’re not ready to use them just yet?

Or you “shop at home”, and pull out way too much fabric, but just never find the time to put it all back away?

Or you’ve made your friends promise to never throw away any of their scraps without giving you a chance at them first, so you have baggies with other people’s scraps laying around?

Or is this just me again?

I used a task similar to this last year, and you can click here to read about how that went for me: Putting Away Stray Fabric. Once again this year, this has turned out to be a bigger task than I imagined, which is why I’ve phrased it a bit differently this year. I’m not asking you to deal with ALL of it, just one pile of your choosing. Maybe one pile is all you have, in which case I’d like to hear from you, because I need lessons in how you manage.

Over the course of this year, even though I’ve made a couple of feeble attempts at managing it, mine is more out of control than ever! Here’s the new basket I talked about from last year’s efforts that I said I’d be using from then on:So what that I chose a smaller basket? Haha! What difference does it make when you just keep stacking fabric to the ceiling above the top of the basket? It’s about to topple over, if not for the wall holding it up. I might as well have gone ahead and used multiple larger baskets anyway! That plan backfired on me for sure . . .

Yes, I’m insane . . . why do you ask?

Well, this is the basket I decided to deal with today. And I didn’t worry about completely emptying it. I set a time limit and just worked as much as I could in that amount of time. So that’s all you have to do, too. I used an hour.

Here’s what my basket looked like after an hour:Better, but far from finished.

Here’s what I did with it:I try to employ Bonnie Hunter’s Scrap Users System, so I have bins for all my pre-cut shapes to go in. I now have all these pieces put away neatly, and I’m really going to try hard to devote some more time to the scraps every week so that I can get them under control and keep them that way. Yeah . . . and that’s what I said last year, too.

So, anyway . . . just pick a pile of stray fabric you have laying around, give yourself an hour, and see if you can make it go away. That’s all you have to do for today.

And that’s the final task. If you’ve done them all, congratulations! I hope it made you feel better like it did me. And don’t fret if you’re not quite finished today. I’ll give you a few more days to work on them if you need to, and leave your comments. I’ll draw for the prizes on January 5.

And now . . . I’m off to Pat’s New Year’s Eve Party. You really should join us . . .