scrap bustin' time

I'm always on a mission to use up my fabric scraps in a useful way, not just to clear them out of my sewing room but also to justify to myself the need to keep them in the first place! It's just that it can be so unbelievably fiddly making stuff out of little scraps, and I'm not even talking about sewing together a bajillion little squares to make one big quilt.

With wet and cold weather around here recently I needed something to keep Anna occupied too, so I delved into my humongous scrap bag and cut out a whole stack of teeny tiny dresses, tops, skirts and pants:

to glue on to these little paper dolls I picked up for a few dollars from an art supplies shop:

Total success! It kept Anna occupied for at least 10 minutes (only about an hour less time than it took me to cut them out.....), although I think she liked the glueing and tasting the glue best of all.  Every Australian kid eats some Clag glue at some point in their young lives, it's practically a rite of passage:

And now we have a whole village of paper dolls with somewhat mixed up fashion sense:

Best of all I have this awesome tin to store all the pieces in:

I purchased this tin of shortbread biscuits last Christmas purely for the pretty tin,and I knew it would come in handy soon enough.  Take that, doubting husband of mine.

So that took care of a small percentage of the fabric scraps, now to find a use for the rest of it!

And thank you all for the lovely comments on Anna's skirt in the last post.  I didn't pick up on the special connection of making something for Anna from something her great grandmother made many many years before she was born, but now I realise it is pretty special.  Her great grandfather is still alive, but he didn't really recognise the fabric - although I don't know if that's because he is 94 and a bit ill at the moment, or whether it's purely because he's male and doesn't notice these things!