TGIFF It's The Little Things

It's that time again! Thank Goodness it's Finished Friday. Let's get to it!

Many of us have projects that require small pieces, a lot of repetition, or perhaps just a large collection of fabrics we need to build up for the final piece. My Popped Color pattern is one of those that I make samples of often, but when I make the bigger version, I need to make 90 flowers, which totals up to 360 petals, consisting of 720 pieces of fabric in the flowers alone. To make it more complicated, I like this project to be as scrappy as possible and that adds up to a lot of fabrics!

When I have a stack of fabrics I'm ready to turn into petals, I set them up in batches and get ready to tack them into their final shape on the machine as you see here.

It saves me a tremendous amount of time to be able to make a pile of these all at once, but I might not have enough in one sitting to make a large project.

Once I have all of my petals tacked and ready to go, I can trim them and stack them to store.

When I'm doing this with HSTs or other scrappy blocks, I press and trim them before storing them in a box labeled with the name of the project.

For Popped Color I have a large basket I keep ready to put all of the stacked petals in. I know that when the basket is full I have roughly enough petals to make a new larger size of the Popped Color quilt.

If you're working on scrappy blocks, you might like to keep track of how many units you have in your storage case, so you know when you have enough to start work on your main project.

When the basket is full, I start laying out my flowers to get a good dispersion of color. In this photo you can see that I like to use the black and white setting on my phone to help me see how the values are working, so I don't get too distracted by colors. Looking at it this way shows me when I have too high of a concentration of darks or lights in one space.

This method works great for pieced projects too!

Here you can see the finished big quilt along with several smaller projects that are also a part of the pattern.

I really enjoy how this process allows me to build up more diversity of color and pattern to give me scrappier projects that are still very well coordinated.

Give it a try and see how well it might work for you to collect your materials over time and make a few blocks or units here and there when you have new fabrics to work with.

Consider your scrappy organization methods for your future projects and show us all what you're finishing this Friday! Please include a link or button to tgiffriday.blogspot.com in your post so your visitors can see everyone's finishes too and be sure to check out the links of other participants this week! Click on the image below to join the party!