mhollifiel

There's a difference between leaders and enders and a scrap piece (often called a spider) for starting and stopping. Leaders and enders are meant to become parts of another quilt. You basically have the pieces of a, say four patch for a secondary project at the ready. Then you start and stop your chain on those as you are working on chaining your main project parts together. Bonnie Hunter uses this method and this efficiency surely contributes to her amazing output.

I am not so organized. I like the idea but I'm usually too excited about what I'm doing to mess with being this organized. So I just grab a small scrap, fold it a time or two and it becomes my spider. I use three or four of these over and over, just snipping them off the chain for reuse. If you do this, you'll soon see why it's called a spider. I am sure I have pitched a thousand or more of these lifesaving "critters" into the trash over the years.