I am talking about a couple of solutions to this actually great and wonderful dilemma! Having scraps means you have already been sewing for awhile. So you are a very rich and somewhat experienced quilter! How wonderful!
For the past few years I have been working at organizing and re-organizing and sorting and arranging and sifting through all my piles of fabric....
A couple of years ago -- the summer of 2012 to be exact-- I spent the summer with my sewing machine and cutting table set up out on my backyard deck and made a dozen scrap quilts that I donated to a charitable quilt distribution program run by my local quilt guild in the fall of 2012. Click on the tab above if you want to see the quilts that I made - Super Summer Snippy Challenge)
But. That project did not make a very big dent in what I had on hand! It did help my community and kept me busy and engaged for 4 months, which was a very good thing.
My next step was to resolve not to buy ANY new fabric -- and I haven't! That means tho I have had very little new INSPIRATION for quite a while. Then my Janome 6600 developed a problem and until just this week, I have not been able to afford the repair... I don't think that not buying fabric has been very successful... The main reason is because I am not INSPIRED to work with just what I have! I think a injection of a new fabric in combination with my stash fabrics would have kept me inspired and producing quilts or other sewn items. So ultimately, even tho the stash has not increased, it also has not decreased...
Well, now, my Janome is at the sewing machine repair guy, and I figure I have a week or so to do something with this wonderful conundrum of too much
fabric...
I came across a suggestion, just this morning, so I am thinking, that since my husband doesn't have to go to work today, I will use him as a assistant organizer -- he did spend most of his working years as a warehouse worker guy doing everything from organizing cleaning supplies to shipping and receiving hazardous waste materials, and sorting and moving a warehouse from an old building to a new built facility -- so he should be a good helper, you think? His "life's work" has been as an ORGANIZER!
(the first step is to iron all your scraps so you can cut them into the appropriate sizes but there is always something or someone who insists on interfering in the process!)
So, basically the idea is not necessarily to actually use up the scrap stash right away, but it is to stack and organize what I have into 'categories' or potential shapes and begin cutting the scraps into squares, rectangles, strips or maybe even into triangles and then to put like shapes and sizes into boxes or containers or baskets -- which I already have an abundance of! (I also have a tendancy to SAVE shoe boxes and now I know why!)
Check out this post from Martingale Publishers - Organizing quilt scraps blog pages (written almost 1 year ago) so this will be my current WORK IN PROGRESS... I suspect I will be at it for quite awhile, but I hope that my stash will become more compact and manageable.
I do suspect that much of what I create in quilts will be SCRAPPY! I think tho, that with alot of scraps I will be able to allow myself to buy an occassional fabric to FEATURE in a project, perhaps as background or sashings or borders.... I'm already thinking about what would go with what!!
Here's hoping that Third (system) time is the CHARM!
Now, you must realize that I have not done all of this in one day, in fact, I have for years kept a box of 2.5 inch squares cuz they are just so darn handy! The hexagon box is also a work in progress that I have been hand sewing hexagons together and adding cut hexies as I need them...
I am planning to increase the selection of sizes - one of those boxes contains 6 inch by 10 inch cut pieces because a few years back I made a "Broken Crayons" Quilt (http://www.abbotsfordquilters.org/broken_crayons_instructions.pdf) I wrote these instructions for my guild newsletter but got the original idea from another guild website and re did the instructions to make them a bit easier to understand. ** the instructions are free to use but if you reprint, it would be nice if you could link back to my instructions -- but I'm not going to sue you if you don't**
So, I think this is a reasonable start, with even a growing collection of selvedges that I am sure I will find a use for -- as you see, I made a cover for a journal with a previous bunch of selvedges...
