Super Stash Bowl

2010 DELAWARE QUILTS
SUPER STASH BOWL
Part three

Next step… precutting. BUT please read this all before you even pick you your rotary cutter or scissors! All of those piles need to be cut up nicely into a common size. OK… hold on, maybe not ALL of them, but that depends on how many scraps you have I guess. And it depends on what size they are too. I mean if you have ten yard chunks in your piles, yes they need to be cut down… but that's going to be a boring looking quilt with all the same fabric in it. Don't cut them ALL down…

Sizes.. Like I said before, size will depend on your scraps. If you have lots of large scraps, then you can cut large squares, if you only have tiny scraps, you will have smaller squares. At this point YOU need to decide what size YOU want to use based on YOUR piles…

I can not tell you from here what size that will be. You need to decide what the smallest size is that you want to use up. Or you need to decide that you don't want to go any smaller than so much. If the majority of your scraps are at least six inches, then six inches is YOUR size. If they are mostly five inches, then five inches is your size. If you save tiny scraps like four or three inch pieces, then your size will be four or three inches.

I also can not tell you how big your finished quilt will be. If I were to cut all of my scraps into a common size and use them in one project I would have enough to cover Sussex County, which by the way is the largest county of the three here in Delaware. Well… ok… maybe not the whole county, but at least enough to cover my one and a third acres at home. But you get the gist, I don't know how many scraps you have so I can't tell you how big your project will be.

The whole idea of this is to use up your stash and/or scraps. And maybe you will have enough pieces to make several quilts, imagine that.

However… Just as an example, if you cut your scraps and stash six inches and if you have 128 scrappy light six inch squares and 128 scrappy dark six inch squares, you could end up with an approximately 80 inch square quilt.

Now hold on one minute before you start cutting… that is for SCRAPS. If you have fat quarters or skinny ones, or half yards or just plain fabric, don't do any cutting yet. First you want to look at my suggested technique for making a lot of the same diagonal half squares found here.

If you decide to use Method D which is one of my favorites, then using two whole fat quarters you could make nine diagonal half squares. That's not too many for this scrappy project, so that would work nicely, give it a try. Of course your “grid” would be six inches or what ever size you have decided to use for your size.

I can't tell you how many you need because I don't know how large or small you want to go. But I can tell you that you want an equal number of lights and darks. And those mediums… well if you have a lot of dark darks, pair a medium up with one of them, and that medium becomes a light. Or if you have a lot of lights, for instance white-on-whites, then your medium becomes a dark.

If I had the orange below in my stash, I would use it as both a light and a dark. It contrasts with the dark red as well as it does the pale yellow, so it could be used either way.