Sweet treats from leftovers

What do you do with your quilting leftovers?
When I listened to Bonnie Hunter's interview on Pat Sloan's radio show, she talked about the importance of cleaning up after you finish a project and shared her ideas for organizing yourself. Bonnie compared it to cleaning up the kitchen after you finish cooking a meal. I am going to try out some of her ideas,  but in the meantime, this photo shows the bag of stuff leftover from my polka dot disappearing 9 patch from last year (click here to see my quilt). One of my closets has bags and boxes full of project leftovers just like this pile.

After visiting the Calico Gals in December and being inspired by their collection of adorable little pincushions, I decided to turn my leftovers into as many pincushions and pillows as I could make. It turned into a wee bit of an obsession and I especially loved using up my baby Half Square Triangles. Here is the pile of some of the pillows and pincushions I have made so far. I briefly thought I should open an Etsy store and sell these...I have enough leftovers to make thousands of them! But then I remembered that when you sell something, you never get to see it again and I changed my mind! LOL
Some of them are stuffed with shredded scraps of batting and some are stuffed with crushed walnut shells which is what the staff at Calico Gals recommended for their pincushions. I tried many combinations and decided that I like a combination of about 1/4 batting and 3/4 walnut shells. I also decided that I did not like how it turned out when I did some quilting on the little block before turning it inside out.


Then I got my mini quilt group turning their leftovers into these adorable treats and here are some photos of what they created.


A couple of pincushions, a hot mat and some bookmarks!

Here's a little collection of tiny pillows and pincushions. It was fun hearing about the projects that were originally made from these fabrics. See the trolls in the corners of some of the blocks?!?
I also thought it might be fun to put a little pocket on the back of the pillows to hold little love notes or other treasures.

Here is another group of projects. One group member made up a watermelon pincushion (click here for pattern) that she made from a kit she purchased at Quilter's Nine Patch and it was adorable. Someone made a paper pieced fish, and someone else...not mentioning any names (Barb) got carried away with beading her pincushion, which grew a tail and morphed into a fish! What great fun we had!