Maybe I'm late to the game here, but I've never seen this posted anywhere...
When I do embroidery design I'm left with a large piece of stabilizer with a little hole in the middle where the design was...
I've been saving them not quite sure how I can reuse them. Then the other night I was doing some embroidery designs and decided to try something...
I took the leftover stabilizer and cut out the area where the design was and I was left with 2 strips, each approx. 2" wide. I overlapped them 1/4" and sewed down the middle of the overlapped area with my regular machine. I then took another strip from a used piece of stabilizer and added it to it the same way.
And guess what? It works just fine! There are no palpable lumps in the new embroidery! I even tried it with tear-away and it works, too! If your embroidery design ends up covering the sewn area, all you have to do when you are tearing it away is to clip that one little thread that you used to join the strips and the rest tears away!
Sure will save some money not having to throw partially used pieces of stabilizer! :)