Kitting it up!

I decided to spend some time kitting up the Florabunda quilt fabrics before I head to Pennsylvania---Focusing on the background yellows--the florals were already cut by width across the grain of the fabric --- I decided that I would do two blocks out of each floral, because that is what I could get out of one 3.5” strip and 1 2” strip…

This is how things work their way through my head:

“How many can I get and have this piece GONE? Versus—“I want one block out of each fabric and have leftovers I’ll have to try to find a use for somewhere else”.

Do you think this way?

In the whole scheme of 72 blocks ---does it matter if there are duplicates? Is it a wiser way to use up the strip til it’s gone--- or, do I want to cut 72 different florals and have a bunch of half strips left over? Which is going to be easier to work with, easier to clean up after, and make better use of the fabric at hand?

SO, in other words, often times the number of duplicate blocks in any quilt out of any given fabric depends on how much I can get out of one cut of fabric with little to nothing left over!

When cutting the bow-ties from strips, I decided that I wanted no more than 6 alike within the quilt. 6 the same out of nearly 500? That’s a number I’m okay with. And many times that means I can get 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 bowties out of the same scrap strip and have that strip all gone.

How easy! Is that really going to change the look that much from a quilt that said “no two alike” ? How many more strips would I be cutting from to do that --- and how many strips would I be putting back IN the bin because I only used a small portion of each strip. Would I be leaving strips too short to be really usable if I were only cutting one bow-tie from them? As it is….as I cut…my 2” square bin is getting fuller just from trimming down the ends of the strips after I could no longer get any more bow-tie pieces from them!

I’m trying to find ways to USE the fabric, not just herd it around from one drawer to another!

Here’s all the kitted to size strips for my Florabunda. I fit this in a one gallon sized zip lock bag! My easy Angle Ruler and regular ruler will be coming with me, along with a small mat for cutting strip sets in to 4-patches, and cutting half square triangles from the short fat strips I’ve already cut to length.

This is so much better than traveling with a bin of fat quarters and hunks and chunks of this and that in my suitcase! This is why I love to kit up before going anywhere. It stream-lines, reduces, and gets a lot of the grunt work out of the way so when I reach my destination I can just plug in and sew! The only thing better would have been if I had had enough time to pre-cut my half square triangle pairs ahead of time too…but I’m fine with this.

A few episodes of NCIS and I’ll be a happy quilter, sewing away!