I challenged myself to really learn how to sew properly about 6 months ago and I have been busy making all sorts of things, I shared a shirt I made here! I have been mainly using fabrics I have designed myself which is an extra thrill and I have been hoarding all those little scraps after I complete a project. When the basket I have been stashing them in was in overflow mode and looking a right old mess, I decide it was time to make something with them. But what? Some of the scraps were just an inch square.
I decided to repurpose all my incy wincy fabric scraps into a larger piece of fabric!
How to Make Fabric from Scrap Fabric
You will need
- A horde of scrapy fabric- offcuts and “waste” from past projects
- Fusible fleece batting- I actually had scraps of this too buth the project is a little easier if you have one big piece. The size of you batting should be the size you want your end fabric to be
- Iron
- Sewing machine.
Working on an ironing board (saves moving stuff around later) lay out your piece of fusible fleece. Then take your little scraps and start laying them on. I decided to have some sort of color scheme but really there are no rules here, follow your heart. I picked out pinks, blues and greens from my stash. The aim of the game here is to completely cover all of your fleece while making sure each piece of fabric has some sort of contact with it.
Plug in your iron and cover your creation with a lightweight cotton cloth ( a pillowcase will work). Then gently iron which will melt the glue on the fusible fleece and stick your scraps in place. The cloth stops everything moving around too much but once you have made a few passes with the iron you can remove it and press directly.
Here are my pieces all ironed in place.
Then time to get sewing!
Simply sew rows of straight stitch vertically
then horizontally
And voila, a piece of quilted fabric ready for a sewing adventure! I plan on making a zippered pouch with this but haven’t quite got around to that yet.
I was so pleased with my first pass at this I went on to make two other pieces.
For this one I selected fabrics with warmer tones, reds, yellows and touches of green.
and for my final one it really was a mish mash of all sorts!
Aren’t they just lovely!
Looking for more sewing projects?
Really cute project. Fusible interfacing could work, too. I was a quilter before I was a designer. I have scraps that came from both of my grandmothers’ fabric stashes and other people, too. I sometimes make crazy quilt blocks or wonky log cabin blocks with small scraps. Then these blocks get used in charity quilts. About a year ago I started using my Spoonflower swatches in some of the quilts.
perfect use of spoonflower swatches!