I have come to the conclusion that I am a fabric collector more then a quilt maker. I hate cutting up beautiful fabric.

Funny!

I'm the opposite, I love to cut fabric. Especially with my Sizzix Big Shot Pro. To me there is something so satisfying about taking a bunch of scraps and putting them through the die cutter (it might be a form of instant gratification :rolleyes:).

Rob

I love my scraps, I have very generous quilting buddies that give me theirs! I know when I use them in my scrap quilts what came from whom (for the most part). I have made many string quilts and wall hangings from donations- and have gifted them to many and to non-profits. I would rather make a scrap quilt than a patterned one.

I cut my scraps into strips when I can. After I finish a quilt I make strips of the leftover fabric. Last year I decided to make strip quilts from them and made 19 tops for battered women. It took most of January to get that done but emptied a whole bin of scraps. I still have squares that I need to make into something. I love my scraps and I use them a lot for appliqué, etc. at the moment I am making a quilt called "Lost Pyramids" from the Quilt Merchant. It is a copy of a very old quilt an is made of 2" triangles. My scraps are coming in very handy!

I don't cut mine until I need them, I have used for mystery quilts and glad to have them.

I've cut my scraps and many fat quarters using Bonnie's system but do include 10" and 5" squares. I find they're more accessible to me this way rather than waiting until I decide to make a scrappy quilt. However, there are some fabrics I just can't bear to cut and those wait until I find the perfect pattern for them. These are usually fabrics from specific designers like Tula Pink since or Fig Tree since all of their fabric lines tend to play well together.

Is it appropriate to tell my funny scrap and sewing stories here? I hope so.

I make my husbands boxer shorts. I swear this is true. So he goes to the doctor the other day and the doctor tells him to drop his pants. And he hesitates, and explains to the doctor about this and that he can't remember what he is wearing, but it may be embarrassing. It was summer flip flops and the nurse had the usual reaction women have when finding this out. (your wife does that? Really? Why?) So he breaths a sigh of relief that it wasn't the kitten shorts.

How this relates to scraps is that the boxer scraps always show up in my scrap quilts.

I can't buy precuts much because the few times I have I feel like it doesn't leave me with enough options. As far as buying yardage I'm afraid to buy too much because once it is been used for more than one quilt I sometimes don't want to see it again.

Thanks all -- normally my scraps just live in bins -- I really need to sort by color (great idea). I really need to make a scrappy quilt out of the fabrics that I really like that are now scraps. The challenge is that I hate to waste a bit of the fabric that I have preserved by using the cutter. I think I need to have a talk with myself.

My reasoning is sort of odd ball, I have the same eye disease Bonnie Hunter, MacTel. I can still see everything you see, but depending on size and distance I see it bent.
I know, watching the progression, that cutting accurately will be the first skill to go. So I've been precutting like mad since last summer.
the 1.5" go into light and dark box, the strings, sized strips, and blocks are all sorted by color. I love looking at all that scrappy goodness, and have made three quilts this fall, pretty likety split as the cutting was already finished.

and a few sweeties here donated a couple of boxes (I paid shipping) to freshen my stash because I quit buying fabric in 2001. So there is room for both sides! and that is what makes us interested in all the threads here...

Prior to this frenzy I didn't have much use for precuts (and never the store type precuts) but over the years I've turned into an avid scrappy quilter so it makes sense for and to me. If i were still making planned quilts I wouldn't get the concept either.

I have so many scraps, three large tubs packed so full nothing more will fit. I could never use them without making a mess a having to repackage it all after digging through them. Decided to go through them all this year and cut all the small scraps into 5", 6.5" squares and 2.5" strips. Anything larger than fourth yard got saved. So far I have gone through one tub and have two large stacks of squares and a lot of strips. I am sorting the squares by color or theme as I cut them as I plan to donate most of them to the Women's Club I belong to and we will sell them at our quilt show in March. Did it last year with a bunch of various size squares I already had cut but knew I would never use all of, and they were very popular, of course we sold them much cheaper than quilt shops. It feels good to do something with the scraps and hope to end up with only one tub when I finish. I make a lot of charity quilts so hope to use up a lot of scraps doing scrappy quilts this year.