Reclaiming Leftovers

One of the things I am committed to is striving to keep as much as possible from going to waste and ending up in landfills. We reduce our use of many things; compost as much as possible; reuse paper, plastics, aluminum, etc.; recycle everything our local system accepts; donate reusable items; and try to reclaim anything that can be used in new ways.

Like Christmas cards

 

 

Bubble wrap 

  

Magazines & wallpaper

Recently, Ami Simms posted a blog entry challenging people to use leftover fabric. The 2014 Crumb Quilt Challenge

It included a video from one of her classes. It was about how one of the students uses the leftover pieces from quilt blocks. Crumb Quilts

About the same time, I happened to see a video of Noriko Endo on The Quilt Show with Alex Anderson & Ricky Tims describing how she creates her pieces with what she calls “confetti.“ There are two videos available onYouTube: Confetti1 and Confetti2
I started thinking about using up the fabric scraps I have been accumulating over the years.  

Since I often work on projects that require coordinated fabrics, I tend to forget about all the bits and “crumbs” available to me. While I’ve considered techniques like Noriko’s in the past, I haven’t done much with them. These videos seem to be a wake-up call to think about them in different ways.

How about you? Do you have additional ways of using up those pieces? If not, do the examples spur any new ideas? I'd love to hear how you would use some of your scraps to create new works of art.

Until next time, I wish you peace and all good.