Being thrifty

This is my first attempt at an improv sampler from Lucie Summer's book Quilt Improv. You may remember the other one I made for a Christmas gift  here. I loved making this one as I just rifled through all my scraps and put them in any old way (well not quite any old way - but without worrying too much). My most favourite bit is where I trimmed a bit off the square made of purples and yellows and then was able to use the trimming as well. Can you see?

Using up my scraps made me think of being thrifty and wonder just a little bit at the irony of lusting after beautiful new (and usually pretty expensive) fabrics to do a craft that was originally the height of thriftiness. I did wonder about using scraps from old clothes to make a quilt but when I looked at what I might have in my wardrobe so many of the fabrics are made from different materials - even some of the cottons have elastane in them to help them hold their shape or be minimal iron and I don't think it would work to mix different types of fabric.

However I did think of a thrifty tip the other day. I remembered I had a load of trimmings from the spare few inches on the edge after I had quilted a fairly large quilt.

You can see them here still attached ( 505 spray baste) to the wadding. I'm going to peel them off and trim them down into quilt binding. There will definitely be enough for a small quilt. In the interests of thrift I'm also going to try and make some blocks just using my small scraps and see how they turn out. Isn't this one lovely from the root collection?

And now I'm just smiling to myself - as a person of a certain age, I was brought up by parents who lived through the second world war. For as long as I can remember my dad used to stick the old bar of soap to the new one so not a scrap was wasted. He even used to cut old bed sheets in half and re-sew them sides to middle! Now there's thrift for you!

I'd love to know any of your thrifty tips for quilting!