My Wall of Fabric -- it is actually a bedroom closet, now the sewing room...
When I bring new or even thrifted fabric into the STASH, I usually wash it and then tear off the selveges from both sides. I used to leave the selveges on, but now I have a use for them (saw a skirt made of sewn together selvedges on a web page)
The stack of torn off selvedges has grown, sometimes if I have no immediate use for the long strips, I will roll them into a ball -- but the problem with a ball is that then you have to unroll it to sew them together and you don't necessarily want all the same selvedge together, and long strips with no writing on it I usually elminate and that part of the selvedge is saved to tie young plants to a stake in the garden, or other things where you need soft but strong string -- even use it as a tie for gift wrap...
So, all those strips of selvedge gets sewn together with scraps of quilt batting (warm and natural seems to work the best for me) as the backing. Then, in this case, just as we used to do with school books that we covered with brown paper to protect them, I have made fabric covers for empty, lined or unlined small journals. You can get the journals at the Dollar Store or as I often do, get them at the thrift shops for even less than at the dollar store.
Not only are the selvedges useful for this kind of scrappy art, but all those odd bits that are left when you are cutting squares and triangles or rectangles and trapazoids from your larger pieces of yardage. There always seems to be a couple of inches or even less than an inch when you trim... Bits that probably should go into the bin, recycle or garbage... But no, when I get a stack of little bits I often will iron them on to light, non-woven fusible interfacing -- leaving the raw edges exposed -- sometimes the random bits just work out to be the perfect journal cover, and sometimes I will make a small cosmetic bag or tote or whatever strikes my fancy -- the more small scrappy bits, the more fun it is to try to fit them together to make larger fabric pieces and the more interesting.
Now, I must add that these little exercises in saving tiny bits is not an everyday thing (but the savings of the bits is). I have a couple of baskets under my cutting table that collects all those bits for a someday session of sorting. When I want to sew but have nothing particular in mind except that I just want to sew I can play around with those bits. The sewn together selvedges may sit on a shelf for months until the inclination to actually use it up strikes my fancy, or to get out the "fused" together tiny squares, triangles and rectangles and create something just a bit off beat... Now, to find a way to make use of these PRODUCTS -- perhaps a online outlet to sell them? Well, I will think on it...
