Scrap Happy New Year

Happy New Year! It is that time again where we all share our scrap progress. My favorite time each month is when we all link our websites and share all the scrap glory!!! Before I get into those specifics, a little explanation.

The fabrics you will see in this post were all won by my daughter playing fat quarter bingo. You may be asking yourself “what is fat quarter bingo?” The game is played just like regular bingo but you gamble a fat quarter for each card. All the antes are collected. The first person to get bingo, wins all the fat quarters. There are really no rules associated with what kind of fabric you win. It is a mystery. Today I am going to take the mystery out of it LOL.

You may end up with Christmas Santa fabric, there might be dog bone fabric, toss in some Easter bunnies, and some Autumn, and there you have a gob of fabric that really comes no where close to matching, lacking cohesive vibes. Well, what does one do when you attempt to marry all these scraps together? Well, you get a scrap tornado. That is what I am calling this. I will post more about this when I have time to explain the specifics on how this was sewn together.

To commemorate the fat quarter bingo, I have selected 36 fabrics to swirl in thew quilt. There were actually two pieces of fabric that were not cotton (SMH), someone anted poly blends….so those are getting eliminated. I still have about 8 more fabrics that I will have to figure out how to incorporate in to the fat quarter bingo quilt. The quality of the fabric varies greatly. Some are paper thin, some are dated from the 70s, and some are really nice moda cottons. Glad I am well versed for scrap usage or I may have given up on this.

While this is not he prettiest scrap quilt I have ever seen, it will hold a very nice memory for my daughter. And it will be completely hers and usable!!! Sometimes scrap quilts have a humbleness about them to really makes me like them more than the modern 40 fabric lines that come together in the jelly roll, layer cake, and charm packs.

I am going to have to scale down the amount of pictures I use on the site because WordPress is saying I have used more than 3 gig. And it was true. Last year they tricked me into a 50 dollar subscription to keep the blog going. I am refusing to do this for 2026, As most months I only post once a month. So for the quilt alongs and free patterns that I have put out there, they will eventually be deleted. I deleted most of my older posts from 2014-2019 completely. If you have a good idea of a work around on this, please drop that in the comments.

The red floral you see in the photo, funny story, that red used to be in my stash. I donated it to the guild. And one of the quild members cut it up into fat quarter bits and played with that fabric. It came full circle. That red was given to me by a coworkers mother who was downsizing. The real dated stuff I passed on. Glad I did, they found a perfect use for it. They figured out how to get it back into many peoples stash LOL.

Make sure you visit the scrap happy goodness linked below, I am always in awe at the things people make with their scraps! A special thanks to Kate and Gun who host the marvelous monthly makes!

Kate, Gun, Eva, Sue, Lynda,
Birthe, Turid, Susan, Cathy,  Tracy, 
Jan, Moira, Sandra, Chris, Alys,
Claire, Jean, Dawn, Gwen,
Sunny, Kjerstin, Sue L, Vera, 
Ann, Dawn 2, Carol, Preeti,
Nóilin, Viv, Karrin, Amo, Alissa, 
Lynn, Tierney and Hannah

Thank you for stopping by and reading my blog!

Done with 2025, and ready for a good year.

2025 started out poorly for me. You may recall I rung in the 2025 new year with a broken foot. That resolved itself. Then my aunt died. Then my mom started having AFIB. Then we had a tornado and mom had surgery the same day as the tornado….. No power in the month of June in Texas is quite miserable. (Mom is healed and that all worked out!). With many people retiring at work, it left me holding many bags. Bags of knowledge and people started leaning heavily on me, and that was a gob of stress. Then, in Nov I hit a deer and messed up the car, let’s just say, glad 2025 is behind me.

I counted up the quilts for the year. I had 8 quilts I finished, plus two elaborate pin cushions, a shirt, and a wall hanging. I felt like I was really going slow in 2025. But considering the plans life had, I think I had a better outcome and was probably being too hard on myself.

So during my prolonged time off for the holidays, I took it easy. Rested. Made sure that I did not over do things. Tried to get out of the stress mode that I have been in all year. And I needed that. I needed to quilt at the longarm, I needed stress reduction.

While trying to make content for YouTube, I realized I was lining the pockets of the big guys while my fortune to be made was let free (no fortune yet). So the YouTube suffered. That compounded my stress. I decided for the quilt I have been working on since the middle of October to not post anything of it on social media until I was almost done. And you know what, I learned something. I was losing the joy of what I was doing by trying to create content that may or may not be liked.

So 2026 is going to be a bit different. I am going to sew for me. I am not going to even try to appease the complainers for the channel. Yes, I have people with little comments that really bothered me. Maybe I was thinking too deeply about those comments. It made me realize I pander to no one. I should do what I enjoy. So screw off to those that complain LOL. 2026 content is going to be what I want and what I like, and I now understand I do not need a tutorial for every block, or a pattern/template for all the blocks that I do. If someone does not like my change of routine, I cannot make 100% of the people happy 100% of the time. Wasted effort in trying.

So in the fall I decided to splurge and get a kit. I started working the kit mid October. Every bit of spare time in the evenings, or on the weekends, or meet ups with the local guild, I was sewing this kit.

Dec 19th rolled around which was my last work day for the year, and I was just enjoying sewing the bits and bobs. Dec 20th the guild met, I sewed that morning from about 5 am till I moved the sewing to the senior center at 9:30, and then quit at 2:00. That is the longest marathon of sewing I have done in ages, and it felt good!

Christmas Day I sewed oodles of spare time and by golly the fabric book I was working out of let me know that I was getting close to having all the pattern pieces with fabric attached. I started building the blocks and then the quadrants, and tearing off the foundation paper. This was oodles of work. Oodles of enjoyment, and I am happy to say it’s completion also made me happy!

The headlight was murder. The paper removal was very tedious, but I built a car in my living room! I can’t wait to get this in the garage and quilt it hahahahaha!

Thanks for stopping by and reading the blog!