Every month when I manage to make a scrap project happen, I always comment how I cannot believe it is already, in this case, August. My goodness I wonder if I did not work 40 hours a week if my week would slow down any? Time is just flying!

I have made good progress with my scraps. Last month I showed you my shark tooth scraps. While that came together fast and used oodles of 2 1/2 inch squares, eventually my variety died out, so the shark tooth blocks stopped. So I decided to work a different scrap.

I have gathered strings for a very long time. Previous string projects kind of left me turning my nose up at the idea of using them. So I got them out, and they played nicely with me LOL. I grew out the shark tooth, and trimmed it down to form a center square. Imagine this trimmed LOL!

Because I have not touched my strings in over a year and half, I had ample variety. And those strings and shark teeth became this star.

I am finding that most of my stash is less than one yard of fabric, so I got out all the yardage I had and the fabrics auditioned themselves. As much as I wanted to use the effervescence on the right, it was just too busy, and the back was more of a border print, and did not match what is showing here. This part of the quilt took 3 yards.

This is now a top, and all the little bits I trimmed off while making the flying geese, will become a super scrappy binding.

You know, I actually crunched numbers ithe quilt above to see if the amount of scraps I used, vs the amount of scraps I created. And surprisingly, those flying geese created a gob of scraps darn it. But after calculating, and subtracting the new scraps this only used 2 1/4 yds of scraps (because I had so much pink background to add back to the scrap pile). I came out ahead, but not as far as I wanted to darn it.

This was the last quilt I quilted on the longarm before I broke my foot. It has just sat there, while I simmered what I was going to do. I could proceed to binding, but here is the thing. While at the back of my machine using a gentle wave panto, the darn foot of the longarm got cock-eyed. Which caused the hoping foot to drag the fabric. I was planning on entering this in quilt con and was so disappointed this happened. I wanted it to be perfect, and it was NOT. So, all this time it has kind of been nagging me. The day before prime day, I was watching a hand quilting frame/hoop. It went to like 60% off, so I managed to snag it for a little over $30. So I have decided I am going to hand quilt this in between the gentle wave, and rip out the longarm quilting. Originally when quilting this, I wanted to run neutral thread thru the neutral area, and then change thread to red in the hourglass. But doing a panto made that next to impossible. So now, I am hand quilting this, I can do it the way I originally wanted to do it.

My stitches are not nice and even, I am still learning. I am thinking I need to get a thimble with a rim cap on it to help me. I am enjoying trying something new, and getting my way with the original thread concept I had.

See how there looks to be puckers in the longarming? Hopefully that will disappear when I rip it out. First though I am hand quilting in between since this is kind of stabilized well.

I also got out my Lori Holt Farm Girl Vintage books as well as Summer Moon and wanted to make some blocks and taper the blocks from small the large, and then I thought, why should I sew new blocks? Let me go to my box of orphans and see if I can get the same affect I am looking for. And I am liking this layout! Many orphans are coming out to play in the graduated columns, it works!

I have a couple really big Lori Holt blocks at the very bottom that cannot be seen, and they will all sew in wonderfully. Taking the same size orphan block and turning it on point, grows and graduates the column. As you can see I have oodles of 9 patches that I will need to sew together to make it a bigger block, but gosh, that box of orphans diminished. I only have a few left. This option is much better than making a gob of potholders.

I got best of show ribbon with my favorite scrap project to date shown below.

And this has already been put into use! I cannot wait to wash this for the first time! My daughter latched onto it (I think because of the ribbon).

If you are interested in any of the quilts you see in this post, you can visit my YouTube channel, or visit my blog post for the all the hourglass blocks.

And we had our local show of quilts. I love it when my quilts get to hang where I can get a full picture of them. Here is a slide show I prepared of all the quilts. There are antique quilts, and plenty of scrappy inspriations.

Make sure to check out all the ScrapHappy bloggers! Once a month all of us, if we can, post about how we are using our tidbits of scraps. It can be any medium, not just fabric. Very interesting and clever people, check them out! Thank you Kate and Gun for making this possible.

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

And thank you for reading my blog!