Scrap Quilting. Part 1.

Scrap quilting. What do we do with all the scraps we accumulate as a quilter?

Some throw these away and use new, virgin fabric for each project. Some keep the spare scraps to use for “future Projects”. These can often be a work of art in themselves as they are often stored by colour, size, designer and even pattern to name but a few options.

Some, like myself keep all the bits in a big bag labelled scraps!  Even down to the last bit of selvedge!! These are worth looking at as a form of textile art in their own right, well I think so. That sentiment might just be a fabric hoarders reasoning but hey, so what.

I do this because I have had hard times in life and times when fabric was the absolute last thing, I could even think about buying so these scraps would come in handy to help me escape the mental torment of the day. It could also be that I will not waste anything.

But recently this got me thinking about what to do with these scraps of fabric. The larger bits could be used for a quilt or other project, the smaller bits could be used for something else and the thin but long pieces could be used to wrap up the fabric that I was sending out to a customer.

Anyway, I digress.

I had 5 large industrial size bin bags full of scraps in my studio. These were just sat there under a table begging to be opened and used, or at the very least to be organised a bit better. Quilters love organising their fabrics. So, one mad morning whilst the wife was sleeping I snuck out at 04:00 hrs and went to my studio unit a couple of miles away from the house with the sole intention of sorting these bags out.

I got one done in 6 hours!! As it happens this one had a huge amount of batik fabric in it. I remember doing a quilt about 15 years ago with batiks and found that I just did not like batiks, so the spare bits were stuffed in here and left.

Batik scraps

I also remembered that I made a lot of mistakes on this quilt as I needed varying lengths and widths of fabric for the project. As I had only been quilting for a year or so at this time I was not too familiar with cutting fabric properly, so I cut all my fat quarters into 10” squares to start with. Then I cut these 10” squares into different width pieces which meant I had loads of waste left. Now I would just cut off the bolt and sub-cut to the exact size pieces.
Therefore I had a lot of pieces all 10” long by different widths. Some 1” or 2”, 3”,5” and more.

To make the original cot size quilt must have taken about 30 FQT’s if the waste was anything to go by.

So, I put all these pieces into piles on the desk in different width, 1”, 2”, 3”, 4”, 5” etc. Now what do I do with all these piles? Put a laggy band around them and put them back into the bag or use them for a project.

A project it is then.

I set about using my Beninia 330 sewing machine to stitch each piece together on the long, 10” side. I took one piece of 2” and 1 piece of say 3” and stitched them together. I then did the same with a 4” and a 1”. The randomness of this was disturbing as I like order.

There was no pre-ordained idea of what the correct size fabric to sew together would be. Nor was there a projected idea of the finished article or what it would look like. In the end, these pieces of fabric were all different lengths and not even 10” so that made for a bit of fun. This all led to the joy of the projected finished article.

In the end, I started to chain piece 2 pieces of fabric together until all these pieces on the desk were used up. This resulted in now having a heap of 342 x 2-piece fabric swatches. Each one was either finger pressed open or ironed with my Oliso smart iron which was a new toy to play with. These are exceedingly fantastic pieces of kit if you don’t have one already. The Oliso irons take your ironing to the next level, really, they do. Just take an anoraks word for it.

So I started again to sew these 2 pieces of fabric to another 2 pieces of fabric in a chain. I then had 171 x 4 fabric swatches all in a chain. Again, these were ironed and then sewn into swatches of 8, then 16 then 32 etc. In the end I had a Tom Baker Dr Who scarf of multi coloured bits of Batik fabric.

The plan was to then make these into squares of the same size so I could then sash these together with other scrap fabric to make a quilt.

The irregular sizes meant I had to cut down the strips of Dr who scarf fabric into smaller sizes to get the best fit for the project. Again, this left a bit of waste, but I know where the 4.5 bin bags were hiding…

This is a fantastic way of using your scraps of fabric and more importantly, you can sew the pieces together with any colored cotton as it will not matter because the fabric colours are so wide-ranging.

It afforded me to use all the part bobbins of cotton for my sewing machine and all the sneck ends of cotton reels lurking in the bottom of the draws.

Of course, this is not a show quilt, although I would be seriously proud to display it in my gallery of quilts in my new shop that is soon to open.

Going further, not all the threads were the same weight or even all cotton, some were from my now departed nana’s stash of polyester reels of threads from the 1970’s….

I am ready to start adding the sashing now and the borders and ready to see what the final project looks like. If nothing else, it kept me quiet and out of mischief!!

This is the link to part 2 of my epic missive on scrap quilting. https://alanteatherquilting.com/scrap-quilting-part-2/

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INTRODUCTION TO BEGINNERS QUILTING WORKSHOP