A tisket, a tasket, a little scrap basket

This week's sharing at Vicki Welch's Real Studio Tour has to do with creative storage ideas.  Not being all that creative, most of my fabric stash lives in old copier paper boxes and are stored in the laundry room cabinets.  Um...and on top of the counter, stacked nearly to the ceiling.  Well, there's a bit of a mess there, but we won't go into that just now.  I can still reach the washer and dryer.  That's all that matters, right?

But recently I've taken over the upstairs bedroom vacated by our recently married DD and have my sewing machine in there.  Now, I try to keep the mess under control, which basically I can hide it all in less than an hour if company is coming.  But some things can be hidden in plain sight.

One of my second-hand store finds was this fairly good-sized picnic basket.   It sits out all the time, and looks cute as can be, but it has a secret life.  Open up the lid and inside are my zip-loc bags of scraps.  All sorted by size from 1.5 up to 6 inches.  Here you can see 4 inch and 3.5 inch bags just bursting out the top.  There's even a little orange ruler to quickly measure a scrap when I'm putting things away.

Whether I'm searching for a particular size strip or square for a scrappy block, or have been cutting yardage and have a bit left over from the end of a strip to put away, I'm into the basket nearly every day.  Making a real effort to square up and sort away my little bits of scraps really keeps them under control, and makes it way easier to find just what I'm looking for.  There's a bag for triangles too.  The bonus is that it's easily portable, and I can pick up the whole thing and take it wherever I'm working on a quilting project.

When a gallon-size bag is so full I can't fit another scrap inside I know it's time to search out a small scrap quilt project that uses that size of block or strip and have a little fun!

Thanks for stopping by today for the 'tour.'  There were lots of good tips for unconventional quilting tools shared last week and I'm sure there will be some great ideas for storage shared this week too.  If you have a moment, leave a comment.  I'd love to hear from you!