Late summer is a good time to do some sorting and tidying in the studio. Ready for a fresh start in September, perhaps, since that always feels like the start of the year to me.
I went through every box of fabric (my fabrics are sorted by colour and the pieces are usually a fat quarter or so in size). I took out all the pieces I thought I would never use and donated them. Here is the box of yellow fabrics after sorting,
I have a box (formerly a mushroom tray) full of fabrics in each of these colours: red, aqua, light/mid blue, dark blue, purple, green, yellow, orange, peach, pink, brown, white cream, grey and black. There is also a Christmas fabrics box and a novelty prints/multicoloured fabrics one. Here they are on the shelves in the studio. The boxes stack neatly on top of one another.
The next step was going through all the scrap pieces of wadding. I sorted them by fibre: although I now only use 100% natural fibre wadding, there are leftover pieces of 100% cotton, of wool, of 80/20 and some (quite old) pieces of 100% polyester. (NBThere is a post here about how to choose between different fibres.)
Most of the wadding pieces are long thin strips which have been trimmed from the sides of large quilts after they have been quilted. I identified several pieces that could be joined together to make something large enough for Special Care babies’ quilts. For our local hospital Special Care Baby Unit, the finished quilts need to be 18 x 24″ so the wadding pieces needed to be at least 22 x 28″. The hospital requires 100% cotton wadding (so the babies don’t over-heat). I joined the wadding pieces with the method shown in the post here. Below is a pile of four ‘patchworked’ wadding rectangles. As the fibre is 100% cotton, I can press the wadding before layering up the little quilts.
Any scraps of fabric left over from my quilt-making which are less than about 7 x 7″ are stored in my studio (by colour) in baskets like this one, which holds the purple and mauve scraps.
Some of them were pretty full (it’s been a busy year). They needed sorting and I reckoned I could find enough good-sized scraps for a SCBU quilt or two.
The blue scraps were the first onto the cutting board. I pressed and sorted my way through the whole basket, which now looks like this.
I now have lots of fabric pieces neatly cut and stacked for use in SCBU quilts, hooray!
Next week, I will show you what I made and give you some measurements you can use.
If you are interested in using up scraps and giving some joy, try checking out your own local Special Care Baby Unit or alternatively contact the national organisation Project Linus (details below).
Project Linus https://projectlinusuk.org.uk/
Thank you for reading my blog. Quilt Patterns are here, Fabrics are here, Classes are here
If you live in Canada or the USA or have friends and relations there, you may be looking towards Thanksgiving. You still have time to make a ‘Thankful’ table runner (which itself makes good use of scraps!). Buy the pattern here
Amanda Jane Textiles 