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So like so many of us, I have many small leftover pieces of fabric. Normally if it is at least 1” by 2-3”, I’ll throw it in a drawer where I have the smaller scraps. The drawer is a bit full. Part of the reason I was saving them was because of this picture I made once.
The background are all 1/4” scraps and the trees are added on this. The picture above looks a little rough, but framed up, it looks better.
For larger scraps, quilters can do crumb quilts, like shown at the top. I had always wanted to try doing a crumb block and I did. Some links for how to do this are:
From Missouri Star Quilt Company:
Or here:
Another way to use up scraps is by making string blocks. Here’s one I’ve done with leftover fabric from a quilt I’m making using the yellow and white and red fabrics.
While crumb quilts do not need a foundation, you just keep piecing bits together, for string quilts, it is best to have a foundation piece of fabric. I wanted a quilt block to end at 8.5”, so my foundation block is 9.5” just to give me some leeway. Below is a picture with the string block partially done. It looks messy. You start in the middle with two strips and sew them together with a 1/4” seam, flip them open and then just keep adding strips.
Here is how it looked at the end, trimmed up.
You can also see in there that a couple of the “strings” were pieced and they are all not even. Adds to the charm, I think. Still, it would have been one string block with other more traditional blocks, so I decided to make it more interesting by cutting it into quarters and resewing them together as shown below.
A tutorial is here:
Missouri Star Quilts even has foundation papers with lines on them, if needed.
So what do you do with your scraps? and what are you quilting?