Year of Scraps, so far

I have a not-very-rigid goal of making two tops a month out of my scraps. By the end of January I had two tops complete, made entirely from scraps:

Year of Scraps no. 2 - 3 3/4" log cabin blocks, cool colors group

Year of Scraps no. 3 - 3 3/4" log cabins blocks, warm colors group

Next up - tackling a big box of 2" squares that I've accumulated over time. I pulled out the pinks, yellows, and orange squares and started out making these units:

I was originally planning to lay them out as shown above, but decided that I liked the idea of columns of color rather than chunks of color, so now that I've got some of the rectangular units pieced, they are getting laid out like this:

I quickly ran out of squares from the 2" squares box, and moved on to pulling larger scraps and remnants and cutting 2" squares from those. I'll be able to get all the pink and yellow I need for a nap quilt out of the scrap bins and boxes, but for orange I will have to add pieces from yardage. I thought about just making this a project that I work on over time, as more scraps get generated, but decided that the goal of the year is to use up scraps, not to make tops that are made exclusively from scraps. So tonight I will pull some orange prints from the yardage shelves and cut 2" strips off them to get more orange squares to work with.

I want it to look as though the patches are going into the segments randomly, but I'm actually laying out each 24-patch segment quite carefully to make sure I get colors/scales of prints somewhat balanced... which means I have to pay attention to order of squares as I am piecing. I think it will take me the rest of the month to get this top pieced and then I will be away from my sewing machine for 5 weeks, so I think the goal of two tops per month is blown. But that's OK, I am making progress getting through the bins of small scraps. And perhaps I will catch up later in the year when I move from working with tiny strips and 2" squares to working with bigger pieces. I can hope, anyway!