The Ultimate Scrap Buster

It's no secret I've been on a mission to use up all of my scraps this summer and I've been having fun doing it.  But after five, yes five, scrappy quilt tops still didn't empty those scrap bins (which are really not all that big by the way), I was ready for this seemingly never ending project to end.  So I came up with a plan to make The Ultimate Scrap Buster Quilt.  I knew it was going to result in a huge mish-mash of fabrics with nothing in particular to unify them.  I figured it would either be a brilliant piece of abstract art or the ugliest quilt ever made.  :-) I think I ended up with something in between.

First I cut everything I wanted to use into strips.  The length and width was determined by the piece of fabric I started with.  I would orient the scrap to get the longest strip possible whether that was 40" or 4" and then I would cut that up into strips starting at 3.5" wide if the piece was wide enough down to 1.5" if that was all I could manage.  Anything smaller than 1.5" went into the basket for dog bed stuffing.

I then sewed all the 1.5", 2" & 2.5" strips of like width together end to end.  I ended up with what felt like mile long strips of each width.  The 1.5" strips were then sewn to the 2" strip to give me a 3" wide strip set.  There was still a long, long length of the 2" strips left so I cut that in half and sewed the two halves together to make a 3.5" strip set.

I chopped those long strip sets up into random lengths around 5 - 7 feet long.  These were added to my stacks of 3" & 3.5" strips.

Are you following me so far?

The 3" strips and strip sets were sewn end to end.  Same with the 3.5" stack.

A day and entire spool of thread later, I had mile long strips at 2.5", 3" & 3.5" wide.  The 2.5" strip was sewn to the 3.5" strip which gave me a 5.5" wide strip set.  The 3" strip was cut in half and sewn together to make another 5.5" strip set.

I'll bet you can see where I'm going with this now.

Now that both strip sets were the same width, they were also sewn end to end.  At this point, I simply brought the two ends of the incredibly long 5.5" strip together and started sewing down the long side (jelly roll race style) until I came to the end and cut off the end at the fold.  So of course now my strip was 10.5" wide.  Doubling it up one more time I got a 20.5" wide strip set.

I couldn't believe how long the strip set was.  If I continued on in this way, I would end up with a truly giant quilt top.  So I decided I'd better measure what I had and decide if I wanted to keep doubling it, or perhaps come up with a new plan.  Turned out my strip was about 450" long.  So I cut it into three 150" lengths and sewed those together to end up with a giant piece of patchwork at about 60" x 150".  Easily enough to make three lap sized quilt tops.

I started thinking about what I might use for backing on these and had an epiphany.  This giant piece of patchwork fabric could become backing for the two quilt tops I had yet to finish!

So that is my new plan.  I will use this as backing for my jacob's ladder and star quilt tops and whatever is left will either be saved to back a future quilt or it will get it's own backing to make it my final scrap quilt of the summer.

And the best part...an empty scrap bin!!!!