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Last week people told me how much fabric they buy when they don't have a pattern in mind. Lois K suggested a good follow-up question - what do you do with your extra scraps?
My general policy has been to let them congregate on shelves in my sewing room closet - with simple rules of no loud music after 11 pm and no alcohol served to scraps containing images of Disney characters. ;)
Now that I have a loom and am learning how to weave, I think I'll start making scrap balls, like those pictured above, to weave rag rugs.
12 comments:
15 years ago, I worked in the tailor shop in a dept. store. Most of the time when we cut off the end of the pant to hem it, we put the scaps in the suit pocket. But a lot of the time we just thew them in a box. One day I gathered up all the pant ends and took them to my mom, who made two inch strips from them and sewed them together to make long strips. She then braided them into the coolest rug. I still have the rug. Since it was in the 80's a lot of the scraps were polyester. Needless to say it will never wear out. I will have to post a picture of it on my blog. It's pretty neat.
I used to throw them away, but now I give them to my kids to play with.
There's a few things I do. If they're big enough they go back in the fabric stash in the I'm a smaller piece of fabric pile.
I don't normally throw anything away. I'm a recycle queen. I have 3 huge plastic storage bins under one of my sewing tables. I use this fabric for stuffing pillows. When I need a small piece of accent fabric for another project.
But the most fun I have with my scraps is to toss the bins on the floor and let the kids in my summer camp and classes go at it. I tell them to just have fun. Use what ever they want and make what they want. It's fun to see what they come up with and they love doing this.
I make quilt blocks with some of the scraps, Barbie and Tyler doll clothes, also stuff my dog's new bed...my dog is an outdoor dog and I find it easier to replace his bed regularly than to clean them. I also give some to my daughter to play with: she likes to sew strips of them together to make fabric. Recently, she also used scraps to make 200 little jewelry size pouch bag with yarn ties for a school project. I have also donated some scraps to a school club to dress paper cardboard dolls which they sell for fundraising.
I would love to someone to come and take my interlock knit scraps off my hands. I save them but haven't used them. I keep thinking they'll be great for neckline trims, etc, but it never happens. Help!
Depends on how big the piece is and what it is. If it is less than 1/2 yard or cannot be used for trims out it goes. I don't have the space to store *everything*. If it is a knit or stretch fabric, I do save smaller pieces, because lingerie can be made from small pieces!
Forgot to add, if it is silk or anything expensive, I save the scraps, too. I'll probably be cleaning them out soon, but I have a friend who does CQ and will end up with those.
That's not a confession, but... I think you can use them as decoration. When I glanced at the picture first, I though "wow, why is Gwen picturing Ukrainian Easter eggs?" Of course, they are not at all the same, but you get the same colorful effect
as here
I offer them on freecyle for quilters. The printed selvage edges on cottons I mail off to another blogger. Anything smaller then my hand gets tossed.
ooh! I hate to throw away even the smallest scrap. I save mines for scrap quilts and bags, vest and accents on clothing. Of course I have more scraps then I have projects so I eventually have to get rid of them.
I'm still trying to figure this one out! I'm enough of a recycler that I feel guilty for tossing out fabric when it can be used for something else. And so I've got a couple bins of just scraps. I like to use pieces of knits for embellishing t-shirt reconstructions and such, and sometimes I'll do things like make bags out of scraps when I have occasion to. I'm turning my old muslin test garments and scraps from those into a much-needed jewelry organizer. And some of them I'm stuffing into pillows to fill in the gap between my bed mattress and the wall (ah, Ikea beds.) But now I'm not sure if I should be doing that because I'm going to be switching bedrooms and don't know the layout yet, so I might need to throw some out. Yikes!
I used to save everything, and I would cut in the most economical way so as to have the largest possible scraps. When my size was smaller, and I had small nieces and nephews to sew for, many of them got put to good use. But I seldom use them now, and they do take up lots of space. I find too often that the piece I thought I had to use for the need at hand just isn't large enough or the right shape to work. I am coming to the conclusion that 1/2 a yard or less of most things just isn't useful and should probably be tossed.
Lois K
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