What do you do with leftovers?
 

I have finally finished the BH Frolic quilt. It was a bear and I made it a throw size, therefore I have a bunch of units left over. Short of tossing them, how would you organize them for future use?
ps : in the Frolic thread I asked for quilting suggestions,got any?

I keep all my orphan blocks and units in a plastic tub labeled as Orphan blocks. When the box is full I pull the blocks out and start designing on my design wall. Adding in strips as needed to fill areas as needed. Nothing goes together color wise but it all works together if not to make a beautiful quilt, then to make a utilitarian one. I then sandwich, quilt and donate it. My son snagged one as he thought it reminded him of me - scrappy, I guess:-)

Don't have mine done yet but I am making stacks of the extra parts. When I get done I will see what there is and then look at all my "extra" parts I have stored and see what I can design. Will probably give it for a donation quilt. Too much extras from this quilt to throw away!

Don't toss those units! There are many ways you can use them. The first thing that came to mind was on the back of quilts. I donate to a charity who requests blocks every other month & any left over (orphan) blocks that aren't used in the first original quilts are put together by a very, very talented contributor who has such a special gift of being able to make those blocks look like they were specifically made for the quilts she assembles from them. It is a special gift she has that she uses to help this charity...nothing goes to waste.

Why not make a pillow to go with the throw using the leftovers? I keep my leftovers in a container cause you never know when it might come in handy for another project. Also keep my cutoffs from when I merge 2 pieces of fabrics for sashings and/or borders. I sew on a diagonal everytime though some may think this wastes fabric but if there's enough fabric to use it as a HST then it gets thrown into cutoff bucket.

Since we must take our own bags to the stores now, I dress up the bags that have commercial writing on them. I've used many orphan blocks by sewing them over the tote logo... folks even ask where I got the bag LOL

If the throw is for you, or a friend, why not make a matching pillow or 2?

Last year I cut a bunch of BHunter chevrons a little too small for Good Fortune. I had to make 100 more to get the pieces to fit. So I was left with quite a few orphans. Here's what I did.

The way the mystery was designed this year, it gave us a ton of extra pieces deliberately left over... I ended up making additional blocks out of mine and then putting them on the back of the quilt. It was basically enough partial pieces to make a crib/lap sized project. In my case, the fabrics were very distinctive and were not going to play well with others. To make your designed leftovers into full blocks mostly you need some additional 4-patches.

Not remembering your fabrics, Terry, but the sub-units are reasonable pieces that can be recombined or mixed with others into various combinations, especially if you like Bonnie's style.

Ugh, so much fabric went through my hands with Frolic, and all those little unused pieces. I went into a "hangover" after completing my top (still no ideas how to quilt it), took me almost 2 months to recover and clean up my cutting area and fabric storage and before I was ready to start something new again. When I put together my crumbs to send to my crumb quilter you can usually tell my projects by the strata in the box... had so many little frolic trims they went into a small bag of their own, in addition to the bits and pieces left from cutting that were layered.

If I have extra blocks left over from a project I always piece them into the backing. Usually in the middle of the backing where they won't get cut off after quilting.