New Millennium Quilters Guild members no longer have an excuse for a disorganized sewing room, since Calgary guest speaker Kim Jamieson-Hurst (Chatterbox Quilts), gave her virtual presentation entitled How to Wrangle your Scraps.
What are fabric scraps, why do quilters keep them and ways of sorting and organizing them were the topics of the evening.
Jamieson-Hurst is a very busy woman. She has the Chatterbox Quilt YouTube channel with over 58,000 subscribers and 500 videos, along with her Chatterbox Quilt Facebook site that has over 5,000 members. She is a quilting educator, course creator and online teacher. She hosts The Quilters Way where her online membership focuses mainly on free-motion quilting. She is also a Janome artisan and contributes to their blog… these are only a few of the things that keep Jamieson-Hurst busy.
There are lots of decisions a quilter needs to make when dealing with fabric scraps, including the smallest size you will keep; types of projects you do; and whether the project is pieced, appliqué, improv or other quilting (stuffies, pincushions). The next decision is whether you are going to cut your fabric or not, which again goes back to the type of quilting you like to do. Quilters must also decide how to sorts their fabric scraps: individual colour, combine a few colours, size or shape, type of fibre, speciality pieces, or perhaps seasonal.
There are many different storage containers for fabric scraps, but, before you go out and purchase containers, you must go through the sorting process to know how many and what size you will need. If you cannot see inside the container, you must label the outside. Always use containers that have a cover to keep fabric clean, pristine and away from sunlight.
Traditional containers include the drawer cart with removable wheels, a chest of drawers with smaller removable containers inside like shoeboxes, and Ikea Kallax or Trofast units. Spinach containers, zip lock bags, cardboard boxes, over the door shoe organizers, tins, and dollar store shoe boxes also work well.
Possible projects for fabric scraps are striped pieced projects such as mug rugs, striped pieced blocks for quilts or runners, crumb quilting projects (improv), appliqué shapes, crazy quilt patch blocks and art quilts. Members were encouraged to check out Jamieson-Hurst’s free downloads for more ideas.
Both October workshops with Melissa Marginet – Modern Quilting with your Walking Foot – are full. Registration for Melissa’s February 2022 Edge to Edge Walking Foot Quilting workshop is still open.
A virtual class with Brandy Maslowski of Quilter on Fire called Zen Ocean Waves Modern Quilting is taking place in January 2022.
Guild members have now received month two instructions for the Mystery Quilt Challenge, called Pieceful Haven.
The outreach committee introduced three new fun and easy block patterns: Disappearing Pinwheel, Butterfly Bush, a pattern by Bonnie Hunter and Connie’s Chopsticks, a modern quilt block using fall colours.
Lots of exciting quilting opportunities are happening at the guild. If you’re interested in learning more, please contact newmillenniumquiltersguild@gmail.com.
