Thanks - all of you for your posts and thank you Crafty Bear for the link to the tutorial.

Check out www.quiltville.com, She has a whole section on "leaders and enders" and has compiled a book of quilt patterns to use them up. Way to really use up every little scrap!

Hello and welcome from SW Iowa. Glad to have you here.

Visit quiltville.com and look for her "leaders and enders" discussion. She has a plan for actually making "extra" quilts with those scraps you start and finish with. great ideas and lots of free patterns.

Start a paper piece block. Use it to begin and end a stitch line and you get a "two-fer".

I save all my tri that I cut when making hst,no matter the size, I use these for starters and enders. I then separare them by size, Make a row etc . They make great sashing and fillers for different sized blocks. Does any of this make sense? Jolo

I tried using a scrap piece of fabric. Became a real hassle, threads everywhere. Now instead I just backstitch a few stitches when I start and finish a seam. Seems easier to me than messing with a scrap piece of fabric. But we all have our way of doing things. Try several, see what works for you.

Just holding your threads behind the foot works when starting to sew. But to save thread I use leftover binding from quilts Ive made for starters. As you sew along cut off the binding after it is sewn thru and use it again after sewing kinda like chain sewing. Just keep bringing it to the front of the foot until you have used it up.

Those liddle scraps are called 'bunnies' and save tons of thread over time. My DH and I have used them in our upholstery shop for over 30 years and never sew without them. They are also useful to help prevent your machine from sucking in points of fabric at the beginning of stitching.

I never used enders either, but seeing you post made me realise, if we leave the ender on the machine it would be there to then be the next starter.

I keep the inch or so scrapes after cutting to be starters and sew on them until the have lots of thread then toss. To me if you are careful of them and the save them for future use, you might as well leave them out and just hold the string carefully at ther start of the sewing.

Blessings,

Sharon