One truth about scrap projects is this: they are not quick.

To start, you must save the pieces of previous projects or collect the remnants of someone else’s previous projects, and saving takes time.

It doesn’t happen in a day or overnight. Saving takes days, weeks, months, or even years.

It requires a level of diligence and attention that picking 30 of your favorite colors doesn’t, and once you have amassed a collection of scraps, you then have to figure out how you are going to put them together.

You might sort them by length, by weight, by fiber content, by color, and then once you have sorted and arranged them, you might find that you want to do it another way entirely.

My scrap yarn collection is mostly scraps generated from previous projects I have made, the colors of which I selected myself, but in addition to those scraps, there are also yarn scraps from the projects of other crafters.

What I love about scrap projects (and what makes them so challenging) is that you are not trying to figure out what to buy to put together, you are trying to figure how to put together what you already have.

My scrap ripple project is a reflection of my projects past, and as is clear from this photo which I took shortly after lunch today:

that I like bright colors.

I like them a lot, and between the end of lunch and sunset, I made some measurable, if modest, progress:

Here is a detail of the interplay of the texture of the stitches of the crochet ripple and the scrappy ends:

To my eye, these colors look good with just about anything, including this rainbow haired troll:

There are a lot of challenges to scrap projects. The pieces can be difficult to organize, you can’t just go out and “buy more” if you run out, and you don’t always really know how it is going to look when it is done, but the rewards of moving forward (one stitch and one scrap at a time) can be enormous.

Another truth about scrap projects is this: they are to be savored.