Are you baking bread these days? I am. About 3-4 loaves of sourdough a week. And that doesn’t include my newfound love of making our own hamburger buns or my daughter’s obsession with pretzels. What I did not account for is the crumbs. With each fresh loaf there is a slippery coating on my kitchen floor, a Goldilocks trail throughout the living room and dining room, and a coordinating set on the butcher block counters. So. Many. Crumbs.
Suddenly the term ‘Crumb Quilt’ makes sense.
A few weeks ago we were talking about scraps on our weekly Virtual Trunk Show (Watch it on Instagram Live or IGTV). I shared my scrap sorting method which involves, among other things, an old bread basket filled with anything cut as I go on all projects. I did my session of the trunk show outside that day and it was a bit windy. There was fabric all over the backyard! Of course, the overflowing basket didn’t help the situation. It was time to sort.
It took about two hours to get through it, the pile was quite large on the cutting table. Strips longer than 6” here, scraps bigger than a few inches in their designated colour sorted bin, and all the little bits together there. Then I decided the little bits needed to be sorted into two more distinctions - big little bits and itty bitty little bits. Don’t ask me the sizes, it was all arbitrary.
On my birthday I was gifted the afternoon home alone - a delightful treat during Covid isolation - and took some time in the sewing room. It was glorious! For a couple of hours I sewed nearly useless scraps of fabric to other bits. Over and over again. Trim, sew, press, repeat. All to the soundtrack of Dolly Parton’s America.
Eventually I got myself to some random block sizes. Then I remembered that I had done the same thing at some point last year so I pulled out those blocks. That’s a bonus to working with scraps this way: they can always play together.
I’m not sure where these will end up, but it does deal with one of the messes in the sewing room. For now it is the perfect antidote to the world. And a perfect reflection of the crumbs in my life.