Love your Scrap Box

With the price of fabric and dye stuff set to rise in price, I have been looking at ways to use up all the scraps of hand dyed fabrics I have accumulated. Luckily I keep a scrap box and all my odds and ends get chucked straight in there. My friend Helen made a lovely quilt using all her bits of hand dyes, so I had to give it a go. I did dye up my light background fabric which I then printed with a wood block as I am trying to keep this a completely hand dyed quilt again. Once I started cutting, I found I had enough for a second quilt so kept going till I had a pile of some 800 + squares. Here are the first lot, chained together with their light background fabric, and some binding strips already cut from the left overs of the left overs. The plastic bag contains the coloured squares for a second quilt.

You can see the finished quilt here at Main Creek you will have to go right to the bottom of the page to the quilt named Garden Lattice. This is Helens quilt, I am making mine a little larger as I had 2 meters of background fabric to use. I have to be in the right frame of mind for piecing, so leave the piles sat by the machine and go and do a half hour or so when the mood takes me, not the most productive way to work I'm sure.
After I had finished cutting all those squares, I was left with yet even more smaller pieces. I have been making some new stamps and playing around with these and wanted a project to try some more ideas out on, so after selecting a 1/2 meter piece as a background, I have started a small wall quilt which will have some stamping and lots of stitching done in heavy threads.

 More scraps on the chosen background fabric.

The Japanese are very good at using old fabrics and kimonos. There is a very interesting you tube video that talks about Boro or rags used in Japanese textiles. I think we will all be doing more recycling of our resources in the future.  Colouricious have just made a short video called Recycled Reborn. You will see the same idea of using strips of recycled fabric or rags to make a new piece of fabric here also. I have a small weaving loom out the back, so will have to give this a try with my really skinny bits of scrap. With a bit of thought nothing need go to waste :)