#scrap management

Drumroll: there's about 140 pounds of quilting fabric, or (very roughly) 430 yards; the bulk of it is fat quarters, irregular cuts, or scraps, so given the seam allowances involved, it might be drastically fewer yards.

Even so. If a quilt requires 8 yards of fabric, that's nearly 54 quilts. If a quilt top requires 2 pounds of scraps, that's 70 quilt tops. In short: I have more than enough fabric for whatever projects come to mind - in fact, it might be easier to focus on one thing at a time if I had somewhat less.

One of the "rules" I try to follow is: before starting another large sewing project, I must do something with my scraps first.

The "something" can be as generic as "organise them better" or as specific as "make something with them". I don't have to use all the scraps, but the scraps should take up noticeably less space after the "something".

I've been intrigued by the idea of sewing rope bowls for some time, and Scraps Management Day seemed like a good excuse to start. Here's a very good tutorial for sewing fabric-wrapped rope bowls.

I used quarter-inch sisal cord, because it's what I had on hand, and I like the sturdiness of the sisal. I used scraps and washable gluestick; mostly wrapping as I went, picking the scraps on a whim.

Working with sisal, silicone thimbles and nitrile finger cots were very handy, protecing my fingertips from the rough bite of the cord--and the tackiness othe glue!)

I used mostly scraps from Big Blankie, a generally autumnal colour palette. I used various threads, with the main goal of using up my almost-empty bobbins and my least-likely-to-be-used Glide Trilobal (Vegas Gold).

My fabric scraps had lots of stray threads, which I didn't mind for this project. But the varied widths of the ribbons and frayed edges meant that sometimes the stiff sisal fibres would poke out. For any egregiously offensive fibres, I used clippers to snip them as close to the bowl as possible.

The finished bowl measures about 28 cm wide (diameter), and 7 cm deep.

I'm currently using it as a cat bed for this stuffie.

Today’s project is some scrap management, which means my ironing board is covered in scraps lol

I have some scraps from my own projects, some friends have sent me, and some I bought in mystery bags of scraps, because I love both surprise fabric and scrap quilts

Scrap quilt update!