Planning for the New Year

 Folks on the Stashbuster Quilting Yahoo group have been sharing their selected 'Word of the Year' and what quilting goals they have for 2014. I have not picked a Word of the Year, but having spent some time straitening up and organizing the sewing room this past week I realized my scrap and crumb collections have continued to grow. So my focus for 2014 is to use up a good portion of my scraps. It is nearly impossible to measure how much scraps one has, so I went with the next option - go by weight. I weighed my scrap box and crumb bag and it comes out to about 23.5 pounds. Its not reasonable to try to get rid of all the scraps, but I figure reducing the weight by 1/3 should be doable. So that would be a reduction of about 8lbs in 2014. I set 6 month goals of 4 lbs just to break the goal down a bit.
Before starting this scrap challenge I did finish piecing a Disappearing 9-patch quilt top (top photo). Once that was done I spent some time going through some Pinterest images and some of my scrap quilting books and selected about 5 or 6 patterns and ideas that I think would work for my collection of scraps. The first one I am trying out is the Diamonds are Forever pattern from the String Quilt Revival book. Here are my 2 test blocks. So far so good. I will need to start cutting strips to keep going.