Time to use up precuts & scraps - or what I did over memorial day

Following my resolution to use more of my stash, I was looking at the box of 4.5" precuts.  Very few of my novelty quilts over the last few years have used these precuts.  I seem to be doing a lot more fussy cutting from my flat folds.  So I decided to see how many quilts I could make just from the box of 4.5" precuts, some of them from swaps year and years ago.

So I dumped out the box that had previously been organized by subject and sorted them instead by color.  Wow, there were A LOT of tans - I guess I haven't been using the tans as they aren't very colorful.  Gotta use some of those!.  I started putting squares on my design wall.  This first one is a Trip Around the World layout.  I haven't made this pattern in over 10 years, it was one of the first ones and one that got me started shopping for novelties by color, realizing how much of my purchases were blue or black.  I now have a very good stash of yellow, red, green, white, etc.  Anyway, in keeping with the desire to use up scraps, I used a piano key boarder made from the remnants of fussy cutting.  And 100% was from precuts, I didn't have to dive into my stash at all, even to get all the alphabet.

Trip Around the World

Gee, the stack was still huge, so let's do another.  This time I laid out the colors in a diagonal.  And the last border seemed a bit busy, so this time I used a stack of 2x2's I had left from another quilt.

Diagonal Scraps

I realized I had enough piano key borders to make a quilt entirely from them only.  I had made this pattern several years ago.  What a great way to use up all those little bits left from fussy cutting.  My friend who loves crumb quilts would love this one.