QUILTING SCRAP MANAGEMENT: Organize Your Fabric Scraps: Make Scrap Quilts Faster!

hi everyone its Megan from tiny Orchard quilts and today I'm doing a little bit of scrap management and I thought that I would share with you my process so if you follow me on instagram you may have seen that I am transitioning from my old system of sorting scraps which was by color in baskets and I had a basket for each color plus aqua and white low volume and then a black gray basket but this is kind of a mess because there is just everything in here there's large pieces there's little teeny pieces and it's not stored in a way that makes it particularly usable so I have been sorting on my scraps and then cutting them into basically pre-cut sizes so I have a stack of layer cakes a stack of charm squares and then a pile of strings and then all the little leftover bits a little teeny pieces that I'll use for crumb quilting or maybe I'll just stir them all the way I don't know so let's let's get started because I've kind of streamlined this process and I'm working through it pretty quickly so I thought I'd share with you some tips so these are the piles that I sort into and there are kind of the finished piles over here and these are finished useable strings any charm squares that may have been thrown in the basket and then I'll also have a pile for any layer cake squares that got thrown in the basket and then these three piles are the piles that need to be cut down to size so these are pieces that are too wide to be a string but not wide enough to cut a charm square out of so I'll probably end up cutting these in half to make more strings this pile is scraps that are wider than ten inches so I'll be cutting layer cake squares and then other things out of them might get some more charm squares I might just cut it all into strings hope to see this pile here is all of the pieces that will be cut into charm squares and strings and whatever else but those are the three main cutting piles so when I take a scrap out I kind of laid out and look at it and if it is wider than 10 inches it goes into the layer cake square and then this is kind of I'll leave this in the little teeny piece pile why did I even say that it's like an inch throwing that way here's another piece that'll cut in half to make more strings okay here's a piece that is not ten inches wide but it's wide enough to cut charm square out of okay so I have sorted all of my purple scraps into these six piles and then I went ahead and pressed the finished piles so these are the charm squares I found in the basket I found a couple layers cake layer cake squares and then these are all the strips that are kind of ready to use and that leaves me with these three piles now this one is the easiest to deal with because these all need to just be cut into thinner strings so I'm gonna go press these and line them up and slice them okay so as I press these I made sure they all lined up on one edge so you can see this edge is quite thick all the fabrics are touching this bottom edge whereas this edge there's only a couple that are the widest ones that are on this edge so we're gonna clean up this edge and then we're gonna cut from this edge so we get the largest number of strips that are these kind of prime cuts now I cut a lot of layers at once you can certainly do fewer if you prefer that but I use a big 16 millimeter blade and I change it often so now I kind of default to two and a half inch strips so I'm just lining up that line there and I can cut back this way okay no that is a big stack of strips to go into the finished file and now we have all these leftovers which I kind of thumb through and see if and you're too thin to keep there's another one that's a little skimpy yeah and then I kind of stack up the leftovers Ohio and that's that whole pile of strings that's done with just a little bit of waste so the next pile is the charm square pile and this I'll probably do in two chunks so I'm gonna press this in the same way as I did the strings except instead of an edge I'm gonna use a corner so what I mean by that is so I'm going to press this piece and then I'm going to take my next piece and I'm gonna align everything so that a charm square is going to come out of this bottom right corner okay so we're back I pressed a few layers and you can see that kind of all of the prime real estate of the fabric is in this lower right corner so that's where I'm gonna cut my charm squares now some of them stick out a little bit further because they have a selvage that I'm gonna trim off so let's just do that really quickly and I do use the reference lines on my mat to help keep things nice and square so there's our silages and now we're gonna take a five inch slice from this side I always count because I've cut more than a few four inch okay so now we have a slice that has all the fabric on one edge and only a few on this side so let's shift the side of the way and cut our first charm square and I just kind of line it up so that I can see if there is any variation on the layers here that they're all crossing a line it doesn't matter which one and then I can straighten up to that line and then take another five inch cut okay so there's our scrappy charm squares ready to add to our charm square pile and now you have these little leftover pieces now none of them are big enough to be a charm square on their own so the really small ones I just throw away there's a few more little tiny ones and then these little pieces go back into the basket okay now you have the rest of this stack of charm square sized coating pieces now this obviously is too small let's all throw that out now there's a couple of routes you can go with the rest of the stack you can cut another charm square slice or you can cut this into strips this way the same way we did before when we were just cutting this drip pile I really enjoy using script strips so I'm gonna cut these into strips because that's what I prefer but you could get a lot more charm scores out of this if that's kind of your pre-cut size of choice so I am going to turn mine and this will turn it this way so I have the nice clean edge on the side and I'm gonna cut mostly two and a half inch strips but I like a little bit of variation in my strip quilts so I'll mix it up okay there's some two inch strips and I just kind of checked these to make sure there aren't any little teeny tiny strips like this we don't need that but these are all decently sized strips now you could clean off the other edge if you like but I don't bother okay okay I'm Jen with all the charm square pieces and now I just have this pile of larger size pieces to do the same thing but with layer cake squares so time to press and cut all right here we are this is the last stack so prime real estate is here and all of my corners are aligned to this lower right again there are a couple little this is Anna salvage but I wanted to cut off that pinked edge so I left that hang out a little bit more so let's align it now I generate more scraps than I think a lot of people because I'm pretty brutal about what goes in the scrap bin if it is smaller than a fat quarter then I consider it a scrap so I have a lot of large pieces in here and you may not have pieces that are big enough to get a layer cake out of and that's okay they're your scraps as long as you can cut pieces that are useable to you then I think this is a great system likewise if you enjoy using scraps for like paper piecing the little hexagons then maybe you should cut two and a half inch squares I already have a stack of the saw so I'm not cutting anymore but you can cut any size that is useful to you like if you use a lot of three to five inch squares and go for it this was the ten inch slice so this will be my layer cake right here now I'm gonna cut these into you know I might cut em a charm square since I have quite a lot of this okay and then this I guess I'll just cut these little leftovers into some strips let's get rid of their little tiny bits trash and add these to the strip pile over here to get them out of the way that's a cell vigil throw that away okay let's deal with this layer cake square first so we're gonna align the one cut edge one cut edge to a line on the mat and trim them all even okay there's a pile of layer cake squares and see even though some of these were quite small this see that I only have a few leftovers of some of these but because they were all reference to that one corner I can cut them all to the same size even though I can't see them which it really speeds up the process of cutting when you can stack them all and then we just have this little charm square slice that we cut let's just cut this into a couple strips so now that all the cutting is done this is what we're left with I have a pretty decent sized pile of charm squares that I can combine with all of the other scrappy charm squares that I've cut I have a pile of purple ready-to-use strings and pile of purple layer cake squares that can join my other rainbow where cake squares and then my scrap basket is reduced to this little tiny pieces but I can use for whatever so what do you think I have two more baskets to go but um are you gonna cut up while your scraps it's it's very satisfying I have to say and it has really kind of motivated me to finally make some of the rainbow scrappy quilts that I have been dreaming about so thanks for watching you

Channel: Tiny Orchard Quilts

Views: 110,501

Keywords: quilting, quilting scraps, quilt scrap, scrap quilt, quilting scrap, scrap organization, machine quilting, scrap quilts, scrappy quilt patterns, fabric scraps, scrap fabric

Id: O5pZ7Gh3JLc

Length: 16min 56sec (1016 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 27 2019