Cutting up my 5 boxes of leftover pieces from a scrubs’ factory

I had 5 boxes of scraps from scrubs that I bought back in 2015. I brought these pieces over to Poland in boxes. It’s super nice fabric.

But it was all or mostly long, sort of skinny pieces.

This is a sample of ONE of the boxes I had to cut up. It was densely packed and involved a LOT of cutting!

I decided to go ahead and cut them all into 4.5” or 3.5” squares. If the fabric couldn’t be cut into those squares, then I decided to just strip it and be done with it. I’ve had this beautiful fabric on my mind for many years now and a bit frustrated at myself for not using it.

But it was that odd shape. It had been leftover from a factory of sorts as it had been cut out by a machine that left the stacks of fabric cut all the same but sometimes 1/4” deep. So, that told me a machine of some kind probably cut that shape out. The fabrics were from Timeless Treasures, Northcott and other places.

I’ll show a couple of pictures of the selvages which had to be cut off before I could cut my squares.

 

I worked on this mostly when my husband was gone to Central Asia the last time. It was a lot of work, but I so much wanted to be done.

I believe I have a few more boxes in the room where these were, but I’ve not gone back in there to retrieve more as it is blocked by other boxes, which I need to remove. It’s kind of crowded in there at this point.

One of the reasons I decided to do this is just because time is passing and I’m getting older and this may be some of the nicest fabric I have. Period. (I’m thinking back to the blog post Am I the only One? where I wrote about using those special fabrics and not just saving them!)

The second reason I want to tackle them is because I want to work on getting that room back in shape. It looks like a hoarder’s room except most of “the stuff” is in plastic boxes - which I know can still be a hoarder.

This is part of the necessary steps of getting that room back in shape - going through these many boxes of small pieces of fabric.

4.5” squares

So I cut. And cut.

And cut some more. A few days I cut for 3 hours or so! (Never fear, I had baseball games on to keep me company.)

 

3.5” squares

So far, after those 5 large boxes of fabrics were trimmed down, this is what I have.

I now have 5 much smaller boxes of squares. Well, four are filled all the way full and one that is only partly full. One is very full of 3.5” squares and the other four are 4.5” squares but the fourth box is pretty empty as you can see.

I put finished hearts in that box on the top - until I get them distributed. This pic shows the contrast of space - now I have very usable squares!

The strips that I cut from them really upped my totals for last month’s 2.5” and 2” strips (mostly the larger ones). Then I threw the odd shaped pieces leftover after that were somewhat large into a couple of boxes which can be used to either make scrap quilts out of or hearts for the quilted heart project (or something else).

I’ve got a LOT of these 4.5” squares. I got fewer of the 3.5”, but still quite a few.

I’m thinking of trying to make what one You Tuber called a Polaroid quilt - but not paper pieced.

It would be very similar to my simple Label Equalizer quilt, but with a slightly different shape to the pieces. So we’ll see. I would not paper piece it, however - but just make it with thinner side borders.

Here are both of the Label Equalizer quilts I’ve made which use 3.5” squares.

Making any quilt with such a size block is very impressive, however.

So, whatever I decide to do, at least these are already cut.

I am going to venture my way into the room and see if there are more of these boxes stacked up against the outside wall. If so, I want to cut them up as well. Then I can get busy coming up with things to make with them! I’m really excited about it now that I’ve FINALLY decided to “do something” about the fabric and not just “think about” this beautiful fabric.

Thanks again for coming along with me on this journey!

Have a great day wherever you are reading!

Becky Petersen5 Comments