Originally posted September 22, 2021
I have a pretty small area to store fabric, so keeping all the little scraps is not something I have room to do. I used to keep them anyways, and I even made a quilt with a lot of my scrap strips. But, no more. So how do I make scrap quilts if I don’t keep all the little scraps? I have a system I use now and if the piece doesn’t fit in my system somewhere then it goes away.
First, I mostly buy fabric in 1/2 yards or Fat Quarters. I know this isn’t the most efficient way to buy, but since I like my quilts to look scrappy, I have no real need for larger cuts. The exception to this is low volumes used for backgrounds. I tend to go through these a lot faster so I might buy yard cuts instead. I keep all my fabric that is an uncut fat quarter or larger stacked by color on a shelf.
Once a piece is smaller than a Fat Quarter, it moves into one of my bins. These aren’t super large, like 10″ x 6″ x 5″. They fit well in my fabric cabinet and don’t hold so much that I can keep cramming fabric into them endlessly. When I am making a new quilt, this is where I pull fabrics from first.
Finally, when a piece of fabric is too small to reliably be able to cut from it for a variety of projects (think over 5″ square, or 3-4″ if it’s a strip) then it gets to be cut up into what I consider to be usable pieces. I keep the following pieces separate from my bins for use in anything that requires these sizes:
1.5″ squares (for that postage stamp quilt on my bucket list)
2″ squares and 2″ x 3.5″ rectangles (can be used together as flying geese, or alone as pieces)
2.5″ squares and 2.5″ x 4.5″ rectangles (same as above)
3.5″ squares
5″ squares
1.5″, 2″, 2.5″, 3″, 3.5″ strips (anything longer than 12″ or so)
Now, the fun part; Making scrappy quilts without all the scraps!
I like to refer to my preferred method of piecing quilts as “Planned Scrappy.” It is necessary to have some sort of plan in place to make it look nice. I tend to default to rainbow color palates a lot as I love the colorfulness of that, but I will also use 3-5 color palates as well. If one is available, I like to fill in my coloring/planning page to see if I like the colors I have chosen and then figure out how much I need cut from each color and what I will use for my background.
As I stated above, the first place I go to is my bins. The exception to this is if I specifically need a size that is listed above. I will pull what I can from my previously cut fabrics first and then start cutting from the bins. Since I like the final project to have a scrappy feel, I will limit how many I will cut from each piece of fabric. In my Whimsical quilt, I only cut up to 5 squares from each background color and then only 1 from each individual fabric of each color. I needed like 5-6 of each color for each block, so this gave me a super scrappy while also cohesive look. This also took a lot more time than it would have if I was just using a few fabrics for the whole quilt.