I make a lot of quilts. Because of this, I've found it useful to buy batting by the roll. It saves me so much time and money, and I always have batting on hand. I also get it in the widest size available.
Where this gets tricky is that I have a ton of offcuts of so many sizes. No worries, I make quilts of all sizes. From mini quilts to king-sized bed, I love them all. So when I'm basting a quilt, I fold up the offcut and cram it into a cabinet to use later. It looks a little like this:
Actually it looked worse than this! One day I was trying to cram one more scrap piece into the cabinet, and the doors wouldn't stay closed. That's when I realized I was saving all these scraps but not using them because I didn't know what I had or what they could be used for. It was so frustrating.
So, I emptied the cabinet and closed the doors (thank you very much!) and decided to organize my scrap batting stash. Here's how I did it:
- I unfolded every piece and measured the height and width.
- I refolded each piece to make sure it was not bigger on one side than the depth of my shelves.
- I took a scrap piece of paper and wrote the size dimensions for each piece and pinned it to the top of that piece.
- Then I sorted the pieces by size and put them back in the cabinet.
Here's an in progress picture:
Once they were sorted by size, I was able to put them into the cabinet. Would you believe me when I said I had room for more?! It was amazing how much space was being taken up by disorganization. Now, my cabinet looks like this:
While this looks nice, there's even more space in there now because I've been able to use several pieces since I reorganized. Wow!
If you hang onto scrap batting too, I can't recommend organizing it like this enough. I hate waste, so this was a great way to make sure I can use what I actually have before cutting a new piece of batting off the roll - and creating yet another scrap to store. 🤣
So put on a playlist and get to organizing. You won't regret spending some time this way!
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