After every project, I toss the leftovers and scraps into a giant IKEA bag. When it is full, I have to take a few days and process them into smaller pieces for future use.
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DKQG 2018 Diary Schedule
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So, back to the boring process. I have totes filled with fabric. It is supposed to be nicely folded and sorted by size. Neither of these things are true. This is how it should be:
Tote 1: More than a yard.
Tote 2: Less than a yard, more than a fat quarter.
Tote 3: Fat quarters
Tote 4: Strips, mostly 2 1/2” but lots of other sizes too.
Tote 5: 10” squares.
Tote 6: 5” squares. Lots of other sized too.
Tote 7: 2 1/2” squares.
Then there are the specialty fabrics, like dogs or cats, flannels for baby quilts, seasonal fabrics and so on and so on...They each have or need a tote of their own. Don’t get me started on storing batiks. I keep the tiniest bits of them and they are all stored together in a big jumble.
So, I take the scraps, sort out all by size and cut off all the odd bits to square off the ends. Over 1 yard pieces get filed, along with pieces from 1 yard down to 2/3 yard. Everything else gets cut into fat quarters, 10” or 5” squares or 2 ½ strips. Lots of folks buy precut assortments in these sizes and there are tons of patterns for them. Missouri Quilt Company videos use precuts almost exclusively. I personally make my own since I have all these left overs and have them ready when I see a pattern I really like. Of course, everything I make with them tends to be very scrappy. I may take some time and just sew a bunch of them together to have ready to use as quilt backs. That would get a lot of them out of the totes and into use.
All of this takes time, and there may be better ways to do this. How do you store your fabrics? How do you deal with the left overs? How small is too small to keep? I may not have as much fabric as many of you since I have only been quilting since 2014. I considered storing by color but at this point, by size still mostly works for me. If I went to color sorting, would I put all the sizes of each color together in one tote? Let me know what you do, maybe it will help me.