From Swoon scrap....

...to active Spools component!
I can't stand throwing away fabric and when you work on some quilts you end up with little off-cuts that are just too precious to throw away.
We pay so much for fabric in Australia, regardless of the fact that the fabric might have been ordered online from overseas and with our current exchange rate. It might be cheaper by the metre or yard but there's still the postage to consider. So in my book, it still costs and anything that's cut off is just too, too hard to part with, particularly when a design calls for lots of trimming.
To ease my 'fabric guilt' I have zip-lock bags a-go-go, each full of bits of this and bits of that. I divide them into solids and prints and by size and they're born along the way, out of what I make.
Constructing Swoon, by Camille Roskelly was no exception. Each of those flying geese had lots of trimming and lots of discard. I have already used the coloured off-cuts in a little quilt and I popped the plain background triangles in a baggy...."for Ron". (A.K.A. 'later on'.)

Ironically (actually, tell me if it's not irony...), I'm working on another Thimble Blossoms pattern by Camille called Spools. It calls for these tiny little squares of 1 1/4" to be placed on the corners of the tops and bottoms of the 2" cotton spool strips. These squares are then trimmed to form tiny little triangles. Quite clever really.
As I was driving home the other day, I recalled that I had a bag of triangles in Kona Snow, the same fabric that I used for the background of  this quilt and the same that I'm using now. Surely I could re-use these triangles for the squares to make the triangle corners required for this pattern.

Now I realise that we're ultimately talking about 6" or so worth of width of fabric to cut down each of these 140 little squares. But width of fabric is precious. That fabric could be the make or break of a border strip. So I delved into the stash to find the zip lock with the Swoon triangle off-cuts in Snow, turned them out and cut them down to sort of 1 1/4" squares. As it happened, there was a little corner nicked off of each square. But seeing as one corner of the triangle gets cut off anyway, I didn't see this as a major problem.

It worked like a charm. I actually got my 140 x 1 1/4" squares out of 140 off-cut scrappy triangles and created my triangle corners for each of my strips.

I might have had to cut twice as many times to get my 'square' but as I said before, I've left yardage in good shape and the end result is just as grand! I didn't keep what I cut off....that would be just too thrifty....or perhaps I haven't yet devised a plan to use tiny teeny triangles....hummmm the mind boggles!

 

I can't wait to see this quilt. I'm using a jelly roll of Snippets by American Jane for Moda that I bought  oh so long ago (see my first post) ...and forgot that I owned. I'm loving the colours and I'm loving the thrift!