Scraps - everyone has them - Cutting and Organizing fabric scraps

hey guys it's me Robin Aris Island crass welcome back to scratch everyone's got this is a series all about scraps if you spent any time sewing you know there's always a little bit of scraps leftover you never know what to do with that fabric and in this series we're going to answer the question of how to deal with that how to store it and what to do with it after you have it all stored in the last episode I showed you how to just go ahead and iron your scraps and separate them into containers for me separating into containers means this is all the little tiny fabric that's less than an inch and a half pieces of triangles left off of bindings and snowball type blocks just little thin things that you're not necessarily going to use for a block it's too small for binding nothing is ever too small to piece together but in normal everyday projects or you're going to use something that's larger than an inch and a half all of these pieces are either small odd shapes or they're just dudes are too narrow to use for a normal everyday block I also have a container of anything that is larger than the small crumbs but not quite big enough say anything under five inches so in this pile I have little pieces left over some odd shapes a lot of strips and strings anything left over from whatever project as you see as I am I just whatever shape they were left in they just went into this container this is going to be the main bucket I would say of your fabric scraps most scraps are going to be under five inches they're going to be whatever's left over when you trim up your quilt or when you're finished with a piece of fabric and you straighten it out or is that quarter whatever so this is my main bucket and I also have one or I kept any of the larger pieces so these are things that are over five inches even though they might be in weird shapes there's still large pieces that I can get a charm square out of or a large piece of fabric now some of these I probably won't even cut down and we'll discuss that later but these are your larger pieces you're going to handle these just a little bit different than you will the smaller chunks so the supplies you're going to need for this week's project is you're going to need your rotary cutter and your rotary mat you can cut your pieces up with scissors if that's what you normally do a lot of times people who make clothing don't always use the rotary cutter they tend to do it with scissors or new quilters might not have those supplies yet you can use scissors but that's mostly going to be if you only have a small amount of scraps if you have a large amount of scraps like what we're going to be going through this week from my scrap pile you're probably going to be using the rotary cutter I do keep the pair of scissors nearby because a lot of times there might be a weird piece you want to cut off or some strings or anything like that to make it easier on yourself if you're using the rotary cutter you're going to need some rulers the rulers I find helpful for me is a six by twenty-four ruler then I have a nine and a half inch square and I also have a small two and a half inch square now this one I use to determine whether or not I want to get I use two and a half three inch squares for when I do my hex keys so if I have a piece of fabric and I want to see if a section of it's going to work for a hex key that I really like say I want this crazy lady's face I can put the ruler on it and see and then I can just roughly cut around it so those are your main supplies and I also have I already started cutting some of my fabrics so I do have my buckets are set up and I'll show you them over here cats aren't necessarily part of your supply list but if you are a quilter and you have containers of fabric you will notice that you will always have a cat trying to get in the middle of it this is miss MOCA she likes to be on a cutting table without cutting it down now if you have a lot of scraps you're probably going to be cutting them up in small increments maybe an hour a day a couple times a week so whenever I get ready to cut up my scraps I try to set myself up the same every time over to one side I have my three containers of my main size strips one and a half inch strips two and a half inch strips and three and a half inch strips I'll show you a picture here I always keep them in the same order smallest to largest so as I'm cutting I don't even have to think about it I can just toss the fabric into the container and I know I'll always have the same one now over to my other side I have to walk across the room to put my five inch strips in my seven plus strips in I kind of do that for a couple reasons one I don't have enough room on my table to put five containers to most of my pieces are going to be in the smaller sections and these will just be in the way all the time and three it's good to walk away from your cutting mat every now and then walk across the room and put your fabric into another container it kind of keeps your body moving and you're not stuck in that same position over and over because you're going to be sore afterwards okay let's talk scraps depending on the type of sewing you're doing you're going to have a wide variety of scraps I make bags and purses I make quilts and pillowcases and sometimes children's clothing so my scraps are always come in weird shapes and sizes each type of scrap you're going to have to handle a little differently most of the time they're really really simple and you just get your your basic rectangular whatever you cut off your fat quarter now if you look at the size of this one this scrap here's my five inch mark so this scrap is about five and three quarters so as I'm cutting this up I'm going to determine do I want to keep this piece of fabric whole and save it if I decide I want to save it I've been using my seven inch plus container so if it's a piece of fabric that I really love and I want to say like this front but a five fabric I will put it in my seven inch plus strips container even if it's not seven inches I'm still putting it in here because if it's a special fabric that's important to me or a larger piece of fabric I can add it as an accent to a little zipper pouch or tote bag or I can use it for a keyring but if it's something not every piece of fabric needs to be cut smaller and used sometimes you just want to save your special fabrics and you have to allow yourself to save it this is just a simple yellow fabric I feel no attachment to it I don't feel like I need to save it but since it's larger than five inches what I'm going to do is I'm going to cut it into a five inch strip first thing I'm going to do is these two ends of your fabrics may or may not be true and even but the way that I'm going to cut my scraps it really doesn't matter I go ahead and I take a small sliver just off of one side I make sure if I'm cutting it for 5 inches that I have at least 5 inches of fabric over here I don't want to cut it like this because then I won't be able to get a 5 inch cut so just line it up hold it tight and cut it after you make a cut close your rotary cutter because when you set it down you do not want to Nick yourself on that it is very very sharp take this little piece toss it in your trash can that you have nearby we're going to be spending our fabric around a lot if you have one of those rotating mats you might want to use one of those so I just take it and I line up decide that we evened up on the left with my 5 inch mark hold my ruler down slice away close it this little piece is about a half-inch I have no need for this and any of the types of crafting I do so this one I will throw away now we have a 5 inch piece of fabric if you can see that the ends aren't quite even now if I were to use this in a quilt I would be cutting it say I wanted a 5 by 5 inch charm square I would go ahead and even up the sides then because right now there's no need I can worry about that after and then this goes into my five inch pin another type of scraps you're going to have is you're just going to have pieces that have been as you're cutting off for binding or larger squares or whatever you happen to be cutting you could have long rectangles so you just go ahead once again check this is about two and a quarter so I'm not going to get a two and a half strip out of this but I can get one and a half inch strips so my 24 inch ruler is long enough so I can just place this on top but if I were using a smaller ruler I could fold this in half try to line up one side you can see some is sticking out here but I'm not going to worry about that and then if you're using a smaller ruler you're going to want to line your fold up on one of the lines on your ruler so that you're going to get a straight cut because if you cut it like this when you unfold it you're going to have that weird elbow Bend to it so line up we know we have both edges close together when in doubt always put the bottom one further out so you can make sure you're cutting through both layers I know I'm going for an inch and a half so I can afford to cut a little bit of a wider strip off of this side because I know that I'm going to fit an inch and a half here take that piece toss it in my trash carefully hold it keeping all the edges together flip it over now in this one you're going to be more precise you're going to find a line to put on your fold and then you're going to find the inch and a half and make sure it's lined up all the way through when everything is lined up cut it off now this one will go into our inch and a half inch strips now it's too big to just lay in that way it dawned up you want to kind of keep your scraps sort of organized you're never going to be perfect because they're scraps so I just kind of fold it in half and just lay it in there now the only reason you were cutting up your fabric is to make string blocks it's not as necessary to make sure they're a perfect inch and a half if you're going to be just throwing them in a container to make a string quilt later on and all your pieces are going to be a different size you might want to just even up the sides of your fabric then it doesn't matter if it's an inch and a half inch and three quarters or two inches as I was going through my scraps I found this Lions rule fabric and I was going to hope to get a heck C out of it which I won't but when I flip this over I saw that I had used a piece for applique so this has a sticky iron on underneath now I can try and see I won't be able to get an inch and a half out of this so unfortunately for this piece this one's just going to end up getting tossed it's not that big of a piece and sometimes you just have to throw away stuff then I came across pieces like this obviously I cut several different things out of this one I think I'd made a couple baby bibs that's why there's these swoops taken out of it now for this one you have to kind of look at it and figure out where you're going to get your best pieces I have at this end a nice rectangle so what I'll do is I'll go ahead and cut this off just freeform you could use scissors or your rotary cutter and I'll keep that piece to the side and I'll straighten that one up now in my quest to make a scrappy hexagon quilt I can look and see if there's any fun pieces that I might want looking at this one I can get Tigger centered in a hexagon so I might go ahead and just take that piece off and for that you turn this so you can see so for this guy I would just go ahead and cut it here cut it there I like to cut them generous and then as I'm making the hexyz I'll go ahead and determine how much more I want to cut them sometimes I can just do a two and a half inch square and sometimes I need I can get to a three sometimes a little more fabric what actually is better so then I would take this and I would put it into my hexie container which leaves me with this you can put your ruler on it and see what you're going to get now here's my two and a half inch mark and I can get two and a half inch strips out of this one so what I'll do with this guy when cutting scraps if straight grain just kind of goes out the window you have to be careful with any of the scraps you're working with because chances are they're all going to have bias when working with scraps you're not always going to be able to stick with the straight of grain you're going to end up having a lot of bias cuts so what I do is I just stick my ruler down wherever I'm sorry I just put my ruler down wherever I'm going to get the best cut I'll get close to this edge and all of this is a scrap is a trash then I would line up at my tuna a half inch mark and a little trick is if you're going to be using this ruler and you're going to be doing a lot of two and a half inch strips cutting you can take some masking or painters tape find your common spot mine is going to be two and a half put your tape next to it you can do it on the top or bottom I just prefer to put it on the top I don't put it directly on the line I put it next to the line because I still want to be able to see the line to line it up I'm just funny that way so you know when you pick up your ruler and you set it down you're going to be able to easily just go right to that mark and to a half inches is a very common size for bindings or for string quilts or when you're doing log cabins now this piece as we talked before I don't always make my cuts true and make them even but this one has some weird angles so I'll just come down to about where it's and I'll cut that off and this will go into my two and a half inch strip in now I have this piece still now this one I could probably get yes I can get an inch and a half out of this one now even though it's small I might want to do long inch and a half while cabins I might be doing a mini quilt or potholders or small keychain and I need smaller strips so I don't care as long as it's if I'm cutting an inch and a half inch strip then I want my piece to be at least one and a half by one and a half I don't care that it's only three or four inches so I hope the one side now if you have different colored tape you can find your mark inch and a half put the tape in a different spot then you'll know to line up at that mark sorry you guys are sitting right next to me right here and I have to work around the tripod and there's that piece once again I just kind of give it a little step in to even out up now I have this piece and I'm all set I don't care like I said I don't care how long or short it is it could find a home we're just just trying to use up our scraps to get them organized so whenever we we wake up one morning and we have 15 minutes to play we can just grab one of these scrap containers and just sew something even if it's just one block so now we know laying this on that this is two and a half inches so I'll be able to get a two and a half inch strip out of this even that side up flip it around find my line give a little cut turn F inches now as I'm going through my piles as I said sometimes there's just fabric that I really like I have these pieces of crab fabric now these two are of a decent size that I could use them in another project so I really like these and I don't want to cut these up so I will take these and I will put them in my seven inch plus fabric as we can see there are only one two three four and a half inches but as I said I like the fabric so this is going to be my 7 1/2 inch plus or special fabric bin now even though I like the fabric this piece isn't big enough to really worry about I'm not going to be able to get a two and a half inch strip but I can get a one and a half see what I did here I left my cutter open and I went like this with my fabric if I had gone too far I would have hit that blade most of the times when people hit the blades they bleed a lot and they need stitches so you need to really be careful they have cutting gloves that you can put on your opposite hand so if you slip over the ruler you don't cut yourself that way safety has always got to be your high points you have to be careful I should have closed that one up or moved it or held it in my hand still line that up for an inch and a half slice it and in my bin okay we have other weird shapes that happened when you're cutting this fabric I made a set in Mickey Mouse ears with it so I cut circles out of this guy but there's still a good usable chunk over here and over here now remember we have that thin of pieces that are smaller than one and a half inches this one's got the evil queen on it now for one of the projects that I'm doing even though this is small this piece would actually be usable for that project so what I'm going to do is just trim off those little corners there and I'm going to put this in my my anything smaller than an inch and a half and later on in a series we'll go ahead and I'll be showing you that type of project so I want to save this fabric then we have this one that I can just squeeze an inch and a half out of so I'll be cutting this one also this time I hold it and I know I won't accidentally touch it and you see how I use my rotary cutter as a tool to slide a fabric away so I'm not using my fingers and getting anywhere near the blade then I'll go ahead and just clean up the ends so they're almost straight and into my one and a half inch pin now for these guys this one I cannot get a two and a half inch square comfortably from the lips and if I put him on the Turtles I'm not going to be able to Center his face and I'm just going to get the color so if I just want the colors that's fine but I like to have an actual character in it so what I'll do put these two next to each other even though they don't match up shape wise clean off to salvage now I'll take my one and half inch strip from it sometimes you just have to realign it just a little and then I'll clean up my end this end time this ends a little off once again we don't care if they're too small they're more than a bunch and a half square now this piece is a little tougher to get an inch and a half off of I'm sure this is really not the inch and a half inch mark what I do is just trim off that side just a little put it on my inch and a half and I bring my square down to where I'm past this little curve so I know every piece that's under the ruler is an inch and a half I cut there and then I cut around and as I said this one's two and a half inches by an inch and a half so it's big enough to be the center of a log-cabin so I'll save that and everything else will go in the trash you're going to generate a lot of trash with this process and you have to remember these are just scraps so it's okay to be throwing stuff away because this stuff has just been sitting in a bin somewhere in your craft room not being used anyways at least this way you're making usable pieces sometimes if all the pieces are similar in shape and size I'll layer them together square up one edge and then on this one I can get a two and a half inch strip out of it so I'm good all three layers have been cut and my bin so I'm going to go ahead and go through my scraps and start cutting them up and getting into usable sizes we have miss moko who's joined us Miss MOCA has decided to join us so your assignment for this week and it may take you more than one week and that's okay these videos aren't going to go anywhere they'll be there for you when you're ready is to go ahead and start cutting up your scraps you should have them all ironed already and if you haven't purchased your containers now you kind of see how I'm using my containers so you can pick up some of your own figure out which sizes you use the most for me it's the one and a half inch strip two and a half inch strip three and a half inch strip and a five inch strip and then I said I have that about my specialty and my seven inches above because sometimes you just can't cut down a fabric so Miss MOCA is here she's going to help us cut some of our fabrics now I am going to show you some of my larger fabrics these are the ones that I think might be five inches or above I didn't always measure them before I put them in a bucket so let's cut a couple of these so you can see how that goes even in this bucket sometimes we have perfectly shaped strips and sometimes we have wonky off cuts okay now that I remove the cat now we can get a little cutting so once again if you have a long strip just fold it kind of get it so it has a nice fold a lot of times when you're dealing with the five inch in larger scraps they're easier to deal with most of times the cuts are bigger because they're just leftovers from yardage or a fat quarter so I line up my fold on the ruler make a straight line cut now here's a little example that you should probably pay attention more to what you're doing I got lucky this time I have just enough fabric outside of my five inches to keep this as a five inch strip what I should have done is I should have cut this side with just a smidgen off just to make it even so it will have a nice square side just cut off of that little bit and then I'd flip it because otherwise we could have lost this strip from a five-inch down to a three and a half now here's our odd piece I'll show you what this ruler here's our five inch mark what we can do is if we want to make sure we get a charm square out of this make sure you have five inches completely within the fabric so there's always fabric within that five inch square I like to try to go to about five and a quarter to make sure that I have a nice even cut cut that piece if you're comfortable cutting one more side like that is generally okay and safe if not just spin it around then I take this quarter this corner I know is five and five I spin that and I line up the corner of my fabric in the corner and I make sure that everything's lined up and I can cut out my charm square now you can choose to keep this in your five inch bucket or you can put it in a charm square container so that you know no matter there's a lot of patterns out there that are just for charm squares so if you keep this separately then you know you just you can just grab your five inch charm bucket and so away but also if you choose you can put it in with your five inch strips and anytime you do need charms you can just pull it out of there and cut from either you either already have a square cut or you can cut from the arch not yardage five inch strip so then you have these little pieces to deal with go ahead so even though this was in our larger container we can still use what's left and I can get a two and a half inch strip out of this piece you want to get the largest pieces you can you don't want to take a five inch strip and cut it down to one and a half inch pieces now these pieces I'm perfectly fine and just letting these go if you're doing a lot of string quilts you might want to save these for the corners because triangle pieces work great in string clocks now I have this large piece that I had in my container when I was going through my straps my scraps now something this large it is it's 19 by about 24 so that is close to a fat quarter so what I would do with this is I would fold this up and I would put it in my stash probably with my yardage on my shelves or it could go in with my fat quarters so see everything that makes it into your scrap bin does not have to get cut up now I have this fabric I really like this fabric but it's not that large of a piece this one measures well I can get a five inch strip out of this one so this one will be good for charms I'll go ahead take one of the sides the side seems to want to be the one that is the most even and this time I'm going to pay attention I put my my fold on it on a straight line and I make sure that before I trim off anything off of this side that one I'm going to get both layers of fabric on this side but to that my five inch mark is on both layers of fabric and that will ensure I can get a five inch strip out of it now if this fabric had been any larger I probably would have saved it in my special pile because this is a good piece of model blue fabric and sometimes it's nice to have that to go as an accent in a block or two I prefer to make mostly scrappy clothes so it's really convenient for me to have all these containers set up this way once again we have a piece that could go for a 5 inch charm square so I'm just going to make sure my sides I'll get past the selvages and I'll check my square to see if I can keep a 5 inch square within these markings so I'm going to scoot over just a little make sure I stay you can peek see where your fabric is to make sure you're on both pieces cut up here and across okay so by now you guys should have a handle on how to cut odd shapes rectangular shapes how to get out charm squares you can do the same thing with two and a half inch squares one and half inch squares you know how to even up the sides and how to cut through a couple layers or you can cut through just one single layer so now your homework for this week is to go ahead and get through as many scratch as you can I'll go off-camera and I'll do my homework also and I'll be cutting through all the containers of scraps you've seen so far this week and then next week when we come back we'll start talking about different types of things we can do with all these scraps okay I have a scrap tastic week bad puns I know so happy sewing happy scrapping and we'll see you next week bye

Channel: RsIslandCrafts - Robin

Views: 57,050

Rating: 4.815166 out of 5

Keywords: quilt, sew, sewing, knit, knitting, tutorials, podcast, rsislandcrafts, cape coral, florida, robin lalone, scraps, fabric scraps, organizing, shoe voxes, dollar tree, rotary cutter, quilt ruler, cutting mat, quilting, storage, tutorial, crafting, use what you have, recylce, reuse, repurpose, fabric

Id: igJjcXSKJus

Length: 35min 30sec (2130 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 19 2017