How to Tidy your Fabric Scraps and Stash with Lavender & Twine Quilt
Is your stash like mine? Scrap baskets overflowing, colours in the wrong spot, and fabric drawers dishevelled and disordered. Whenever it's time to tidy up my stash, I like to make a quilt while I'm doing it. Let me show you how!
Choosing a Good Tidy-up Quilt
Often when I chose a quilt for a stash tidy-up, I select a single-shape design that's scrappy all over. That way I can go through my baskets and drawers, cutting out a shape or two from each colour, and then making sure my colours are folded neatly and go back where they're supposed to. This time, however, I've chosen something a little different - my Lavender & Twine Quilt in the colours below! I've decided to make each colour scrappy - yellow/gold scrappy kites, navy scrappy squares, low volume scrappy backgrounds and scrappy colourful diamonds. To start, I'm cutting my kites and squares first, so that I have them in view while I choose colours for my diamonds. I don't want too much yellow in my diamonds, and I want to avoid darker blues and greens altogether.
Tidying My Fabric Stash as I Go
Because I'm being a little fussy about the kind of navy I want in my quilt, I emptied out my navy basket and sorted it by colour first. I've got brighter blues, various grey tones, dark teals, and a collection of random prints that shouldn't be there. I put all the prints I wouldn't to use back in the basket, put the wrong-coloured fabrics away in the right baskets, and then started to cut the fabrics I want in my quilt.
Scraps that are now too small to use are put in a rubbish pile (I generally throw out anything that won't fit a 1" hexagon, unless they are a strip, which I keep if it's bigger than an inch wide.) Scraps that are still big enough to use go back in the basket.
Next, I grabbed navies from my stash drawers, and went through the same process. After cutting a bunch of my squares from each print I liked, I sorted prints that were now ‘scrap’ size into the basket (for me, that's anything smaller than a fat 8th), and after cutting, I refolded and tidied the rest into a neat pile, ready to go back into the drawer.
Onto the next colour!
Next, I grabbed my basket of gold and sort them by tone. I immediately started cutting into my warm golds with the assumption I had the right tone. It's one of my favourite colours and I have a lot of it. But after cutting a bunch, I started to feel uneasy about it. After looking at the mock-up again, I decided I wanted to go cooler. I brought out my stash of yellows and decided on a selection.
I sorted my yellow stash into neat piles according to tone, cut from the pile on the bottom left, sorted through the yellow scrap basket in the same way and then returned them to their place!
Look how tidy my yellows are now!
My Favourite way to Tidy-up
My stash and scraps have been in desperate need of some love for ages now, and it feels so good to make this little bit of progress! Next job is to cut diamonds, and then further down the track, I'll dive into my low volume scraps and stash for the white kites and edge pieces.
Usually when I make a scrappy quilt to tidy up my scraps, I choose a single-shape quilt and I attack it all in a week or so, but for this quilt, I'm enjoying taking my time. Different shapes and different colours require a bit more thought, a bit more tuning in. If I tidy up each colour as I slowly make my way through them - maybe one or two colours a week, I'll eventually have a beautifully tidy and easy to use stash!
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