How to Organize Your Fabric Scraps

Is your pile/collection of fabric scraps overflowing like mine?

Is it unorganized?

Do you use it more as a fabric trash pile than a source of fabric for future projects?

If you answered yes to any of these questions..this post is for you!

This week the quilt guild I attend (and officially joined!) hosted a guest speaker who shared her technique on organizing her fabric scraps. I was so inspired by the speaker that I came home and tried it on my own collection. This little project also helped me to get planning some quilts I've been meaning to start.

First, iron out all of your pieces. You might be much more organized than I am and already have yours ironed...I just had mine thrown into this basket and they desperately needed to be ironed. Who knew so much fabric could be stuffed into such a small basket?

Next, trim all of your scraps to get the biggest possible squares you can out of it. I would maybe start with a 6" square, then some 3" squares and a few 2" squares. Just keep trimming until the fabric is too small to use. I cut mine off at 2" squares because I don't see myself using anything smaller than that in the near future. Trim your fabric into squares and organize them by size. I had piles ranging from 2" to 6".
The guest speaker said:
 "If the fabric is ugly, you just haven't cut it small enough yet." 
She has a great point! I kept thinking of this the whole time I was trimming. This is truer than I thought.

Eventually, they will move from piles into bags. This way, you can always just sort them and stuff them into the bag that they match. If your bag gets full, use it towards some scrappy quilt that uses that size square. Sorting them this way also makes it easy when you are looking for a specific sized block for a certain project you need.

I am starting this "Glory in Scraps" quilt, so any red, white or blue scraps went into a bigger bag specifically for this quilt.

For the scrappy quilts, figure out how many blocks there are and make them one block at a time as your bag of scraps fills up. You can keep a tally of how many blocks you have completed on the paper along with what size scrap block you need for it. For this specific quilt, It calls for 2.5" squares. So, I can use my 2.5" bag of scraps for it. I also threw in a few jelly roll remnants to use towards the quilt.

And there you have it! A nice, organized, easy to navigate scrap storage system.

How do you keep track of your fabric scraps?