rryder

hey polyparrot- years ago I used to cut anything smaller than a fat quarter into my favorite sizes and store them by value in shallow drawers from Target.. Then I got away from that and instead of cutting them down, I went for several years without cutting them and instead began storing them by color. i had eight drawers, one for each color: red, yellow, blue, green, orange, purple, black and white. Each drawer had multiple different sizes including uncut pieces mixed in with pieces I had cut years earlier. I found I didn’t like digging through the stuffed full drawers, so I wasn’t using my smaller scraps as I’d done in the past.

Long story short- I have now gone back to cutting anything smaller than a fatquarter into sizes I like to use. I have several stacking drawer units from Target. The drawers are meant for scrapbooking paper so they measure 12” square on the inside and are fairly shallow. I have 6 drawers set aside for my cut scraps : 2” squares, 2.5” squares, 3.5” & 4”, 5” & 6”, triangles of various sizes and leftover binding strips. The 4 and 6 inch pieces were from way back when some of the companies were selling charm squares that weren’t a uniform 5”. But the rest are regular sizes that play well together when making blocks. In each drawer, the cut scraps are arranged in stacks by color and roughly by value within each stack. By cutting them and storing them this way, I can actually fit all the scraps into six drawers instead of the overstuffed eight they had taken. Fat quarter size pieces get folded and stored with fat quarters and bigger pieces get wrapped around comic book boards and stored near my yardage. I can open my “precuts” drawers and know at a glance if I’ve got enough scraps to do the size quilt I was planning, or if I need to hit up the larger scraps or my yardage.

I found years ago that this system worked best for me as I like to make scrappy quilts and I’m not sure why I decided to try the other way.

Rob