“They’re too small to call scraps, really…” said my son when he saw the bags crammed with these delicious offcuts of fabric gifted me by fellow textile artist, art quilt maker Lorraine Edmond of WA, USA; and we settled on ‘offcuts’ for the purpose of that conversation.

As Lorraine said when offering them to anyone who could use them, they really were too small for her and most other art quilt makers to use but she was offering them free of charge to save them just going into the landfill… I quickly put my hand up because they are the perfect size for the piecing I so often do to make inset strips; and I carefully keep offcuts, knowing that just little bits of a large number of pieces of different fabric in a work adds a richness to the contemporary freehand piecing I do…. I feel a bit of a wrench when discarding even tiny little bits of fabric when I’m seriously rationalising my scrap bags.

I put a few sets of scraps together earlier this week, cut them into strips and used a little fusing web and raw edge applique to attach them to a background by oversewing with neon thread:

I don’t remember all the steps that brought me to this point, but I was thinking of a scrap bedspread I made for our bed some years ago, using the equilateral triangle with fabric pieced in (actually edge to edge freehand cutting and piecing two layers, cream+print, at a time, then cut into triangles – it’s easy, pm me for basic directions)

Then suddenly, bingo! this idea popped into my head:

So, what else could I do but set to work on piecing a large number of sets of strips? I just picked up and sewed pieces together randomly, finding that often something great was right at my finger tips, just waiting in line to be next, but other times I had to search a bit to find a dark one, something yellowy, grey/neutral, or occasionally black.

The great thing about this piecing is that when I eventually get to use a piece, if I think a colour is just wrong (rare) then it’s but the work of a moment to open the seam and insert another piece, or to combine two groups. For many years now, for machine piecing, I’ve used only Gutermann Skala (a multifilament type often called ‘bobbin thread’) When it’s necessary to pull a seam apart, you unpick by simply pulling the top thread out, and even with the very small stitches I favour, it’s quick and easy; but the seam itself is as strong as any other machine piecing thread I’ve ever used. And, as this strong thread is very fine, it doesn’t add any noticeable bulk along the seam line, which I also like.