Decisions

Hello!! It's been a while, I've had a bit of a quilty blogging mental block. Thought loads about writing something but not actually been able to do it.
It's that time of year, lots of retrospective posts, lots of posts looking forward to 2014. My problem is that I still can't see the way forward, what do I want to achieve? Where the heck is all this crafty stuff going?

Now don't laugh but I have been thinking about a fabric diet. Been looking at the fabric fast from the Elven Garden thing is, I don't actually think I have a big stash ... Look:

That's the yardage
And this is the FQ storage:

Now I know it's not much, there are stashes out there that would kick sand in the face of my puny wee stash. But oh yep I forgot the shweshwe fabric ... Not got a pic of that, and there may be a charm pack or two (four plus 8 more on the way from a swap ...)
But it is proving stressful for me. I have managed to use up about 17 FQs busting out some beads of courage bags. I need some focus, I need a plan and reducing down this pile will help. So that will be my main aim for the start of 2014.

Seeing the wood from the trees

I am a university librarian, the past few weeks have been spent mostly helping my final year students with the literature searching for their dissertations. Bless them, all wee stressed out souls! More than one of them has said that they needed help seeing the wood from the trees, I hope I played my part in that.
It got me thinking, this is exactly what I need in the patchwork room, I need to see the fabric from the scraps. Does that make sense?
I know to some this may not look a lot but to me these boxes of jumbled up overflowing scraps are a constant source of stress.

They were nominally sorted by colour but some cross pollination had occurred ...

I decided enough was enough and last week embarked on a major clear out ....

I took out each box, there out those itty bitty bits (you know what I mean, we all have them :-) ironed bigger bits and decided only to keep stuff I could realistically use. Anything big enough that wasn't going to be kept was cut up into strips to make into a jelly roll quilt pattern I found, others were cut up into hexies (thank you big shot!)

And I was left with - THIS!!!!!

There were times during this mammoth cutting session that I questioned my sanity, I now have a numb right arm from all the cutting and my tendons may never forgive me.

Bbt I now may just be able to see the fabric from the scraps, which can't be a bad thing can it!

I also have the makings of a scrap quilt which will be a great memorial to the huge scrap pile that was