Tuesday, January 29, 2019

The War on Scraps

As I'm cleaning out my sewing room, I'm finding UFOs, fabric, dust, and SCRAPS!  Where did all of these scraps come from?  And why didn't I deal with them when I first made them?

My new goal for this year is to put an end to all of the stashes of scraps I find in my sewing room.  My plan is to watch movies in the evenings with my husband and cut my scraps into sizes that I can easily use in my quilts.

I set up some tray tables, a small cutting station, and a small pressing station:


 I gathered my basked of scraps:


and then gathered all of the other stashes of scraps into a giant IKEA bag that I can barely lift:


And I haven't even found all of the scraps yet!!! I think I can cut scraps while watching three movies every night for the rest of the year and still have scraps left!

Every time I mutter about these scraps, I know that I can throw them into my dog beds and be done with them, but this "grew up in Pittsburgh with 70% unemployment" frugal gal can't bring herself to get rid of these knowing that they still have useful pieces left.

Do you have a stash of scraps that needs to be dealt with?  Do you dispose of them, stash them, or deal with them?

Share your best tips!



4 comments:

Quiltermary said...

Like you, I have convinced myself that "cut parts" and for me -strings, do not count as scraps. My IKEA bag is only 3/4 full. But the parts ... !!!

Shelina (formerly known as Shasta) said...

I am working on my scraps this year too. My plan is to just choose a scrap quilt (actually I've wound up with two since one needs bigger scraps than the other) and cut for and sew those scrap quilts. No saving fabric for future use - just use it up and get it done. It's part of the touch everything only once philosophy. If it gets sewn into blocks, I don't have to find a place to store that fabric. I am pretty sure that the original plan was always to have a scrap quilt going but somehow that didn't work out as planned.

Paula Reid Machine Quilter said...

My friends think that I am obsessive about piecing backs for my quilts from the scraps leftover from making the tops. I have beautiful quilt backs and very few scraps to deal with later.

Lisa said...

I keep everything 1.5" square and bigger. I have a drawer of strings. I have containers of 2.5" and 1.5" squares that are slowly becoming blocks. The rest are in drawers by colour. When they drawer gets full I make monochromatic scrappy baby quilts.