A look at my scraps and what I do with them.

I love scraps.  Let’s face it, I love my fabric and I hate to throw it away.  It’s like if you buy a sandwich and you throw out half of it.  Okay maybe not exactly, but you get what I’m saying.

So I  have a lot of scraps.  A lot of a lot of scraps, but where do they come from?  Where do they go?  What do I do with them?

I have an hour basket hanging on the edge of my sewing table, and whenever I cut up fabric to a piece that’s too small to fold, I’m talking it’s smaller than a fat eighth or so, I toss it into my basket.  Whenever I’m trimming up a quilt after I’ve quilted it and I have to trim off the edges of the backing, I throw that in there too.  The only scraps I don’t keep are minky because if it’s so small I can’t fold it, it’s probably too small to get anything out of it.  Sounds familiar, right?  That hour basket is only so big, so when it fills up I take a break from sewing and I sort it into colors.

I’ve seen a lot of people who sort by colors, by sizes, strips with strips and squares with squares regardless of color, or even people who cut their scraps into specific sizes.  I just keep things as simple as possible, and I sort them by colors.  The only funny sorting I have is I have a bag of white strips.  I don’t know why I keep getting so many white leftover strips of varying sizes, but I do, and that’s where they go.

I don’t iron my scraps, because what is the point, and I shove them into little ziplock bags.  It’s really funny to me to see which colors I have more of.  I have a lot of cool shades like blues and greens, and I have very few warm colors like yellows and orange.  Also, I have the tiniest bag of purple, which is funny to me because I really like purple!

Rainbow of Scraps!

So what is the point of keeping all of these scraps?  They’re so small, you can’t do a whole lot with them, right?  WRONG!  These scraps are perfect for paper piecing and scrappy quilts.  They work great for paper piecing because they’re already cut into small parts, so you don’t have to worry about cutting a small piece out of anything, and you won’t have much waste.  If you have read Sunday Morning Quilts or a number of other quilting books about scraps you’ll see that there is a lot you can do with scraps.  I made my origami cranes quilt that I blogged about using nothing but scraps, and I’m working on making a quilt from Sunday Morning Quilts called Splash, which involves making large “fabric slabs” and piecing them together.

Focal Block

Two big blue scrap bags!

So before you throw out those little bits and pieces of fabric, wait!  There may still be life left over in that fabric!  Do you like using scraps?  Tell me about it below!  Until next time, happy sewing!