Welcome back! This is a continuation of last week’s post where I concentrated on using up scraps in your fabric stash to make blocks. This week, we’ll move on to other ways to use up those fabrics. I know we all have fabric stashes, but whether you’re wanting to whittle that down or just use up the extra fabric from the project you’re currently making, I think my ideas and tips will help with just that. So let’s get started.

Borders

Another way to use up the pre-cuts in your stash or leftover fabric is to make interesting borders. Borders serve two purposes in my quilts: to add to the design and to increase the size of the quilt. Some of my quilts don’t use borders for both of those purposed, but most do.

Here’s an example of borders that are planned along with the quilt itself to add to the design.

One of my favorite pieced borders is the sawtooth (left) made from half-square triangle (HST) squares. I also like to take an element from the quilt block in the quilt itself to make a border (center and right). Here’s close ups of the last two:

See if you can find the block element that makes up the scrappy borders in each of these quilts.

Then there’s this border that drew on the sashing element within the quilt. I extended it into the border to create an interesting symmetry with the rest of the quilt.

Finally, here are borders I came up with that used up the extra fabric adding to the design element and also serving to enlarge the size of the quilt:

For Scrappy North Stars on the left, I used the leftover fabric for a piano key border. The center quilt, Village Square, has strips of fabric, left over from the center blocks, pieced into a colorful strip border. Finally for Country Dance, on the right, I used the remaining fabric from the churn dash blocks to create the scrappy checkerboard border.

Binding

A simple way to use up extra fabric is for binding. You can either use leftover fabric strips in one color for your binding, or you can make a scrappy binding. Use this on quilts big and small. Here’s a couple of examples on my quilts.

Here’s a close-up of both that shows the scrappy bindings:

Fabric Stash & Appliqué

If you do fabric appliqué like I do, you can find a new life for those stash scraps that can’t be cut into strips for borders or binding. Here’s how I store these scraps:

I have tubs with other colors as well. Now when I need a piece of fabric for flowers on a quilt, I don’t have to cut into a large piece of newer fabric. I dig through my tubs of scraps to find the fabrics I want. Here’s some of my appliqué I have created from scraps:

Finally, if you don’t do appliqué like me but still save those odd scraps of fabric, consider making crazy quilt blocks or quilt crumb blocks.

Sew together several odd scraps and then trim in to a uniform block size, like 4 1/2″ or 6 1/2”. Make several of them and use them to make a crazy quilt. If you are good with embroidery, make it a real crazy quilt experience and add it to jazz up the quilt top.

That’s it for this week. Leave a comment or ask a question below and be entered into a drawing for my pattern, Cabin Stars:

The drawing will be on Monday, February 24th. Good luck! **We have a winner! Congrats, Denise Maguire!**

Happy Quilting!
Deanne