National Quilting Day

So, March 18th was National Quilting Day and my chapter of the Modern Quilt Guild sponsored an event at the International Quilt Study Center and Museum in Lincoln Nebraska. The theme was Upcycling, a new term coined for reusing cloth items to make new items instead of dumping them or donating them. 

"Upcycling, also known as creative reuse, is the process of transforming by-products, waste materials, useless, or unwanted products into new materials or products of better quality or for better environmental value"

I volunteered in the Upcycling room, where we displayed several items made with upcycled items, where I sewed selvages together.

Many of you know a selvage is the edge of a piece of fabric that most of us would clip away and toss. In recent years, these have been cut, sometimes up to 2 inches wide, and saved.

With the addition of more modern prints on the market, these selvages have become bright and cheery and when sewn together in strips make a sturdy fabric with a huge range of uses such as pillows, pot holders, bags and even full size quilts.

Now there are several ways you can sew them together. As I said earlier, I like to cut a wider swath, about 2 inches. This allows me the choice to sew the strips close together, showing just the selvage edge, or to separate them a bit allowing the fabric print to show through and creating a wider stripe. 

You can also sew them down to create a kind of ruffle effect that is quite pretty.

You can sew them onto a piece of muslin or scrap fabric as in foundation piecing or just sew them directly on to each other. There are just so many uses for what used to be toss away fabric.