I know this has been discussed over and over in the quilt world but I thought I’d share a little about how I sort/store my scraps.
Leftover strips and strings go into bins for HeartStrings or other string quilts like my Strips and Strings Log Cabin or my Log Cabin Heart quilts. I do sort out brights from “duller” fabrics in separate bins but other than that there’s no other sorting of those.
Traditionally, I’ve sorted the rest of my scraps by color and kept them in separate bins and when I was ready to start a scrap quilt I’d go ahead and pull some from each bin. However, when we moved from Minneapolis, we went to FL and my stash went to our Big Canoe condo so I pulled an assortment of blue, green, and purple fabrics and put them in a bin to take with me to Florida. I’ve made 4 quilts from that bin and I continue to add scraps in those colors to it so there will be more of them.
Earlier this year before the move, I gathered another bin of scraps that I felt would all work together in a quilt and I brought it to Big Canoe. These two quilts were made from that bin.
And that’s the bin I pulled when I started the Friendship Star quilt. I’d added some additional fabrics when I was packing up the stash during the move too. So while I’ve still got scraps sorted by colors, having these bins with preselected scraps makes it easy to grab one and start cutting. I finished all the blocks tonight but I won’t sew this together until I get back from Mom’s, I need to study it and move blocks around a bit before assembling it.
Of course, having the bins separated by color makes it easy to pull fabric for monochromatic scrap quilts like I did for this tumbler quilt earlier this year. So I will keep some sorted into color combinations I like to work with, and the rest sorted by color.
One thing I never do with my scraps is precut them into standard sizes because I never know what I’m going to want to make with them.