I do every thing I can think of to keep costs down.
First, I never ever buy fabric unless it's on sale.
I haunt secondhand stores for 100% cotton shirts, bedskirts, and pillowcases. They are a great source of beautiful fabric.
The weave is probably a little tight for handquilting but fine for machine quilting.
I'm always willing to trade for scraps. When I get nice yardage on sale, my preference is to trade for a comparable weight in scraps. Gives me more variety to play with.
I have a couple of friends who save all their scraps for me and if they want yardage, they shop my stash first.
I will never be able to afford to send a quilt out to a LAQ, so that's not really an issue.
I think doing things inexpensively is part of the 'thrill of the hunt' for me.
There are some fantastic videos and tutorials for machine quilting at home. Here are some links you might like:
This first one is to a woman named Marguerite McManus. I've watched lots of her videos, and used many of her ideas. One is for setting up a machine quilting table at home for not much money with a sheet of insulation and piece of tablecloth plastic. Works great! I think this is the link Rapture referred to in her post:
http://www.crazyshortcutquilts.com/
This link is to Leah Day's website:
http://www.daystyledesigns.com/
She's a great innovator and teacher of machine quilting and shares generously with links and videos. One of her simplest tips is how to get better control of your foot controller. I go to her often and hope to buy some of her products one day. I think she's already given the info for free, and those are the kind of people I like to support when I can!
This link is for an awesome 'quilt as you go method' in the tutorials on this board, generously shared by K3N. It's readily adaptable to any pattern and I love the 'no hand-sewing' part.
http://www.quiltingboard.com/t-36303-1.htm
Here's a great link for free ways to get your stash organized:
http://stashmanicure.blogspot.com/20...our-stash.html