If you have a lot of storage space and a "waste not, want not" mentality, you can start to run into trouble after a couple of decades of quilting. Every project generates perfectly useable scraps, and you try to keep them organized, and eventually you have enough little postage-stamp sized pieces of fabric to completely cover the state of Idaho.
I've long imagined that I would sit down with the scrap someday and just start sewing some of it together. And now I have.
When I first sat down, I didn't know if I was going to try to arrange patterns by value, or color, or what.
Eventually, I realized I was just going to start sewing stuff together at random.
Some of these fabrics have been on my hands since the first few weeks I took up the craft, in 1994.
I didn't have a real plan for what I was doing, but fortunately we had a big staff meeting at work. These are often good creative catalysts. At this one, I realized that I was going to cut the rough blocks I was making into 10" squares, and put them into a frame of 2 1/2" white strips. They suddenly look a lot tidier when squared up.
Some people have asked whether this is a "crazy quilt." It's not, exactly.
A proper crazy quilt would have lots of fancy top stitching to hold the piecing together. Although there's a small amount of applique in this one, and occasional places where I play some tricks with the piecing, there isn't and won't be anything you could call fancy top stitching. That's not my thing.
I think a proper crazy quilt would be "crazy" all the way through, too, not framed in blocks.
I'll let you know when it's finished, which should be sometime between Christmas and the 2020s.
Incidentally: the depressing thing? I've made more than fifty of these blocks, and the impact on my collection of fabric scraps has been undetectable.
