The Scrappy Story

I am a quilter. As any quilter knows, it's more than a hobby. It can easily become an obsession and hold you in its grip for years. When you exhaust every possible person in your family to make quilts for, usually several until they ask you to please stop, you have to learn new ways to keep applying your art. In my case, I have a large family and I've only been quilting for 6 years. I'm far from exhausting my supply of people to make quilts for. *grin* However, we still do need to branch out and try new things periodically. Usually, we're attempting to 'find ourselves' in what used to be considered "only a hobby" and is now a dedicated art form. In the quest to create more quilts, we create works of incredible beauty that can be functional at the same time. We do it out of love and the need to express ourselves. We don't necessarily ask for understanding. We just ask for our fabric, needles, and thread. Oh, and please ignore the stack of dishes in the sink, the clothes that need washed, and please always wear shoes in our quilting rooms because we couldn't find that needle we dropped yesterday.

In creating these works of art, we use a lot of fabric. We are also terrible at throwing away the tiniest scrap. What many don't understand is that they're still useful. They might not look like much now, but we can still create art from them. We know that every yard of fabric in our scrap basket still costs the same amount that we paid for a full, uncut piece of fabric.

This is my scrap bag. When I finish cutting fabric for another quilt, I just toss the extra fabric that won't fit properly back into my stash drawers into this bag. It is actually a lot less full than it was a few days ago. I have taken it upon myself to start cutting them up into usable pieces.

These are what I'm coming up with to help store my usable scraps. The drawers hold 2", 2.5", and 3.5" squares and my 'strings'. Strings are used to make the greatest blocks that have no plan other than to just make diagonal strips across another fabric that is the background. They're great. The tubs are my 1.5" squares. One holds my prints and the other holds my 'solids.' I actually have very few true solids. They're more variegated, but they don't have a definite pattern so they count. *smile* So now what do you do with them? Well, I personally use them for leaders/enders patterns. I have the 1.5" squares next to my sewing machine. When I sit down to work on a 'regular' quilt that I planned for, I just put one solid and one print through to sew them together. After awhile, you end up with something that looks like this:

This is a small bin that is on the door of my sewing cabinet that I just toss in my sewn together "stamps" when I'm done with them. They usually just sit there until I feel like pressing them out. However, you can get quite a collection of them just by feeding them through at the beginning and end of your sewing when you're working on something else. I was pressing them today and thought I'd get a photo of them really quick before they were gone. I actually had 2 of these bins earlier. So, what do I do with them after they're pressed open? Why, I toss them into a basket! LOL

Okay, so now they're pressed open and tossed into a basket. Big deal, right? However, they're approaching a very usable size now. Hard to believe considering they're only 1" when fully sewn into something. However, postage stamps, as these are called, can make some really beautiful quilts. A lot of quilters don't like working with such small pieces of fabric. However, I find the small size to be fascinating!

Let me show you something you can do with such a small piece of fabric if you just keep sewing them together:

There is "regular" fabric added to it, of course, so you can see what it is. In this case, a cute heart. That heart now measures 8.5" X 8.5" in this unfinished state. Quilters call it "unfinished" because we'll add more to it and it 'sucks up' more of the fabric into the seam. It will take approximately 18 of these hearts to make a quilt for a crib. More, of course, to make a larger quilt.

So, what's so exciting about a scrap quilt and why is it rare that a quilter will give one away? Don't think for a moment it's not because they aren't beautiful. Scrap quilts are great! As we're sewing them together, we are reminded of every single quilt that we have made up to this point. In this one little heart, I can point to several fabrics that went into my mother's quilt. There are some that help make up my son's Monster quilt (still in progress). Another quilt I made as a thank you for my aunt and uncle awhile back. Another son's I-Spy quilt has contributed fabrics, as well as, many of my hand dyes. My husband and I used to hand dye fabric and sell it. When I'd go to square it up, I'd usually be left with just enough to cut a little 1.5" square from it. So each of those provides a memory of the fabric we created together. This little heart is a great symbol for this scrap quilt. It symbolizes the love and the memories that went into each of these other quilts that helped to contribute fabric for this one heart. I can't wait to see what other fabrics make their way into the other hearts.

THAT is why quilters rarely give away a scrap quilt. It's not because it's made out of scraps and is considered unworthy to be given away. It's because they each hold such dear memories of quilts we have usually given away and will probably never see again. Scrap quilts are precious to quilters and will probably always be.