Scraps 101 - Be Scrap-ful! (with Serena from Sewgiving)

Hello everyone!  I'm Serena from Sewgiving and I have a confession to make ...

Recently I was contacted by Sarah to see if I would like to contribute to her Scraps 101 Challenge.  I said "Yes" immediately and then sat back and thought to myself - oops I don't have any scraps.  You see, when I finish a project, I, Serena of Sewgiving THROW MY SCRAPS OUT - uuuuuuugh! sharp intake of air from the ENTIRE quilting community.  That's right, this little girl from nothing has grown into a wasteful creature.  I don't like clutter and, well, to me scraps are clutter.  But from reading everyone's blogs I can see that whilst they are the most common cause of storage issues, they are also little rough diamonds just waiting to be polished up and played with.

I usually only buy enough fabric for the job at hand and I.DON'T.HAVE.A.STASH ... are you still with me or have you fainted?

The only scraps or cut-offs that I do keep are the little triangles that are the result of when you trim your binding pieces after joining the strips.  I was hoping to make my future grandchild a baby quilt out of them.  It's going to take a lot of saving, but with daughter's only aged 2 and 3, I've got plenty of time to save!

So without further ado (and because I have no other scraps to speak of) I shall dive into my treasured lot of triangles and prettify my new daggy 2014 diary ... ugly, isn't it?!

I started by pairing solid and patterned triangles together to see how big (or teeny, weeny small!) they would end up.

Then I measured my diary to see how many I would need to sew together to cover the diary.
I added a seam allowance of 1/4" to the final measurements and figured that I would need to add a small strip of fabric to the bottom to round things up.

I have a few layer cake pieces of Aneela Hoey's Posy range left from a recent baby quilt make, so I used these to make the final pieces of the cover.  You see, I'm getting the hang of this scrap business already!

I needed two pockets on the inside of the diary cover for the diary to slip into.  To one side of each pocket I folded and ironed 1/4" twice then top stitched for a neat finish.

I cut a piece of the text print, for the lining, to match the size of the HST front panel.

Now the diary cover needed a bit of substance added to it, so I used a bit of quilt wadding left over from my last quilt (I'm feeling more thrifty by the minute!) and quilted the front HST panel.

After trimming up my newly quilted front panel, I sewed the stripe pockets to the text lining (wrong side of stripe fabric to right side of text fabric) to complete the inside panel.

I then sewed the two panels together (right sides together) leaving a small opening at the bottom so that I could turn it out.

I then pinned and ironed the opening closed and top stitched to finish.

And there we have it.  One scrap-o-licious diary cover for 2014!

Scraps 101 has been such a wonderful series to follow so far and I'm pleased that I've been able to contribute a little to it.  If anything, it has taught me to be more aware of what little pieces of treasure I could be throwing out ... I shall be more grateful or scrap-ful in future!

Thanks for having me Sarah!

Serena xx

Thank you so much, Serena!  If you've never visited Serena's blog then now is the perfect time to pop over and say hello because she's having a GIVEAWAY!  Woohoo, who doesn't love giveaways?

I am simply astounded that there is someone in the quilting world who throws away their scraps!  Does anyone else throw them away?

Linking up to:

Finish it up Friday at Crazy Mom Quilts
TGIFF hosted this week at Quilty Habit
Can I get a Whoop Whoop?
Frugal Friday at The Shabby Nest