How many of you all have scrap bins that look something like this??

And this is just a small fraction of the scraps I have hanging around my studio. Not that I figured any fellow quilter would need an illustration of how I reached my name here, but if so, this should do the trick! (And I didn't even take a photo of the floor around this basket where strips had edged their way through the wire grid or over the overflowing top.)

I spent much of my Sunday in front of the ironing board taking out handfuls of these strips – did I mention that this basket contains only my scraps in strip form? – pressing them flat and sorting them by tonal warmth and lengths. Thankfully I had some Netflix streaming to keep me entertained. Making my way through season 5 of Eureka, which JUST showed up last week, thank you very much!

Sorry, got distracted... Soooo, THIS happened:

And these had actually already been removed BEFORE that first photo was taken of the overflowing basket. Now I bet you can really imagine how messy the floor around it must have been!

You might also notice a pointed lack of the jewel tone greens and blues. I'm about to get to work on a commission for which I am just beginning to pull fabrics, so in addition to this lovely dowel display there's also THIS:

There is definitely quite a bit more work to do before I can claim perfect organization (yeah right, like THAT will ever actually happen!), but I feel good about where this is going. It will be much easier to work from the hanging strips, which will hopefully encourage me to actually use up those guys before cutting into more yardage. Or at least in conjunction with... who am I kidding I'll always want to play with the fun new stuff!