Originally Posted by beewild
First I would like to say thanks for all of the invaluble tips that I get from this site. It has made me a better and smarter quilter in soooo many ways! I don't post much but MUST read every day to make my life complete. LOL. I need to know if I am crazy or just plain stingy for thinking this way so please help! OK here goes. I made a queen size quilt from the Brasstown Star blocks. The pattern had me cut 4.5" squares from fabric 1, and from fabric 2 & 3, 2.5" squares. Take a 4.5" square, place a 2.5" square on opposing corners and sew across the diagonal of the small square. cut off the corner 1/4 away from the seam, flip and press, repeat on the remaining 2 corners. what you end up with is a 4.5" square with a 2" square in the center of fabric 1. Now as I was working on these blocks and my scrap pile was growing I got more annoyed that I was wasting so much fabric! With all that being said this is my question.... would you have altered the pattern and cut the pieces to the correct finished size and done it that way or would you have followed the pattern? With the prices of fabric these days that added up to a lot. I figured that I wasted appoximatly half of the fabric used to make these!!! I did finish the quilt but it costed me almost twice as much? After my very long winded explaination my question is what would you have done?
Thanks in advance for your advice.
Pitch 'em. Unless you do scrappy. I don't worry about "wasting" fabric. If there are two different ways to piece a block, and one is easier than the other, I could care less how much fabric it "wastes". I don't consider it a waste. If it bothers you so much either save them and use them for something else, change techniques, or give them to someone who really will use those bitty pieces. Mine go in the trash. I've decided not to keep anything smaller than a fat quarter, and even then, I know I'm probably NEVER going to use them.