Today, having finished off the piece pictured in the previous post, and not yet settled on my next creation, while I thought about it I decided to rationalise my two bulging scrap bags, of the heavy duty clear plastic kind that new pillows come in. One has a tear and is starting to look as if it will break wide open and suddenly spill a heap of bits out onto the floor some time soon when I move it around. It took me an hour to rationalise one of them – chucking out the rubbishy little bits of fabric I know I really won’t use, and the frayed and tangled threads that build up in those bags as I rummage and stuff goes in and out.

Mind you, I think at night when it’s all dark those scraps breed up a bit too – in all the years I’ve been extensively using scraps of fabric, they’re been gradually increasing in volume. I carefully keep offcuts, knowing that just little bits of a large number of pieces of different fabric in a work adds a richness to the contemporary freehand piecing I do. And I always feel a bit of a wrench when discarding even tiny little bits of fabric when I’m being quite practical and realistic!

So the outcome will be about 2/3 of the huge amount of scraps, maybe a little less, of the volume that were stuffed into those bags. The little amounts I’ll probably fuse onto whatever background I select (which could also be black) really won’t make much of a dent in that volume now in the scrap bags 🙂

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A few months ago, I played with these stencilled gold blobs+gold stitch, and have it in mind that fused fabric blob shapes in blues, greens and yellows with some neon thread stitchery could be interesting and fun to do.

It’s too late to start this today, but tomorrow I’ll get those scraps all sorted before breakfast before I start the new 40cm work, with a new audio book at the same time 🙂