I didn’t always collect my fabric scraps.

Anything larger than about 3 inches I just generally tossed. I didn’t think I’d have a use for small pieces. This makes me sad now, as saving scraps has sort of become a thing I love to do.

A couple of years ago, a friend, and then another friend, and then another friend, sent me a link to this quilt, which is designed to look like a bookshelf full of books. “This is perfect for you, Amy!” my friends told me. “You love books and you love quilting, so it’s like all your hobbies in one!”

Well, some of them!

After I saw that quilt, I realized: DUH. Scraps. I should’ve been keeping my scraps! Nothing I could do about it, though, except for start. So I’ve been collecting what I think of as “books.” They are scraps of all different colors, from almost all of the quilts I’ve made in the past three-ish years. Sometimes I fussy cut the books so they look exactly how I want them to. Sometimes they’re just scraps, between 1.5-4 inches wide and whatever height I have left.

I still think about the scraps I wish I had, though. I love the thought of this quilt, made up mostly of the left-overs of things I’ve made for other people, for my kids, and for myself. Many of the books I could tell a little story about, where it came from or what person I made that quilt for. In this way it will be both a book quilt and a story quilt. I wish I had pieces of everything I’ve made so I could say (and I don’t know who, in my imagination, I’m telling this story to!) “this came from the quilt I made for Haley when she graduated from high school” or “this came from the little Christmas quilt I made for my mother-in-law Beth.”

Today, I started my decluttering process. I kept pushing it back because I’d think “OK, I’ll start with this mess, but wait, I need to clean off this shelf first, but wait, I need to empty this closet before that…” and then on down through all the spaces in my house. Finally today I just picked a closet and started, the closet under the stairs.

This closet has never been very well organized. It had my wedding dress, empty boxes for stereo equipment (because the box makes it more valuable…I guess), several boxes of memorabilia from both my childhood and Kendell’s, a box of cassette tapes (I haven’t talked myself into getting rid of those yet, I know, Marie Kondo thinks I’m lame), the jeans I’ve been collecting to make a denim quilt with for myself, the T-shirts and race shirts I’ve been collecting to make a shirt quilt for myself, and a whole bunch of various pieces of fabric. (As well as an entirely overwhelming amount of largish-sized batting chunks, not big enough for even a whole baby quilt, but too big to just get rid of…)

And, oh, sweetness. Look what I found!

Those are scraps from a baby quilt I made for Kaleb, the quilts I made for the Bigs in 2005, Haley’s hippie Halloween costume from 2006, the first big quilt I ever made which was Haley’s queen-sized rag quilt from 2005. I also found a collection of scraps from the baby quilt I made for Jake, back in 1997, and by “I made” I mean “I helped but mostly my mom made.” Scraps from my autumn rag quilt. Some Christmas scraps and even a few from my Thanksgiving quilt. (The magic of scrappy quilts is the more variety of scraps, the better.)

I showed Kendell the treasures I found and he was like, ehhh, so?

But I’m so excited. It’s like finding little pieces of both myself and my kids. I can still remember how I felt when I bought that purple swirly fabric, very pregnant with Kaleb and panicked that I didn’t have enough stuff for him and excited to see his quilt come together. How much Jake loved his animal quilt, Nathan taking his alphabet quilt for kindergarten show-and-tell. Haley’s adoration of her hippie pants (which I added pink dangly beads to!)

It’s not all of the scraps back. But it’s a few. A few more stories to add, a few more ways to remember.

I still need to straighten the scraps up and make them into books. Add them to my growing collection. One day I’ll have enough to put my bookshelf quilt together, but for now I love the contents of that little storage box, a bunch of fabric stories waiting to be combined into a whole.