I like to make quilts from scrap fabrics. In contrast to buying three coordinating fabrics from a fabric shop, with scrap quilting you’re often incorporating dozens of fabric patterns in one quilt. So scrap quilting requires a different design process.

For years I’ve looked for quilt books that showed scrap-quilt solutions that worked well. However I’ve never found quilt books with enough good examples to justify the cost of the book. If a book has three quilts I like, and the book costs $21… that’s $7 per quilt solution.

About six months ago I got a brainstorm. I googled “scrap quilt,” then clicked on “images,” and suddenly I had hundreds of examples at my fingertips. I enlarged the ones I liked, printed them out, and put them in a three-hole binder. Every few months I go back and look for new examples that have been posted. So now I have a customized book with 75 examples I like.

I’ve also made “books” for other topics that interest me. I have a binder for the Internet recipes I’ve tried that were “keepers,” and I have a third binder with reference materials on nutrition and weight loss.