Making New Fabric from Fabric Scraps

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You know what the most stressful thing about quilting is for me? Fabric scraps.

It’s not just the piles of scraps I have to clean up and sort through after every new project. It’s not just the ever-growing bags of scraps taking up space around the quilting room. It’s the fact that when I decide to make something new that will use up scraps, like these string blocks I just made from my Red scrap bag:
…even then, the scrap bag never seems to empty out. Not only that, making the blocks creates a NEW pile of teeny tiny scraps that I really don’t know what to do with.I hate to part with even those tiny scraps, because I’m very much aware of how much I paid for that fabric in the first place. Getting rid of little bits and pieces feels like throwing bags of gold out the front door. So I feel pressured to do something productive with them. But what?

Yesterday I decided to try a couple of approaches I hadn’t tried before. After making a pile of string blocks from the longer strips, I made a pile of improvised Log Cabin Courthouse Steps blocks with the shorter strips, squares, and rectangles. They haven’t been trimmed, and some of them still need to be enlarged with more scraps, but here’s what some of my favorites look like at the moment:

That was better! I felt much more productive and less wasteful after making them. And maybe my scrap bag was looking a little emptier.

But…  I still had this mound of little triangles and odd pieces. I decided to make a new red fabric out of them. I took a block of the old sheet fabric I use for string quilt foundations, put on a layer of Pellon Wonder-Web, an ultra-light fusible glue designed to layer between two pieces of fabric, and then arranged my scraps on top.

I used my iron to fuse the scraps to the foundation, then free-motion stitched the whole block to tack down the edges and points. The results look like this:

I learned a few things by making these experimental fabric pieces. One is that my foundations made from an old sheet were a bit heavy for this purpose. After fusing and stitching, the fabric is stiffer than I’d like it to be. Next time, I’ll try something thinner, or just use a piece of thin woven fusible stabilizer for the foundation. I also used a variegated red-and-white thread for the stitching, but for future attempts I’ll look for something that blends in a little more and doesn’t show off my rusty free-motion technique quite so starkly.

All in all, though, I’m very pleased. More fabric!