Fabulous Scraps

As a quilter and textile artist I have been moving toward using recycled, repurposed and sustainable fabrics in my work, so any source that offers those catches my interest immediately. That's how I discovered Fabscrap, a non-profit service that collects waste and unwanted textiles in New York and Philadelphia, mostly from the fashion industry, and recycles them. Part of their service is to offer for sale to the public yardage, scrap packs, yarns, trims etc. at very low prices.

I decided to invest in a multi cotton scrap pack ($4.00 for a pound) and see what I'd get. Boy, was I surprised and delighted.

All of the fabrics I received are in this pic and the ones that follow. There are many swatch book squares, but also some decent size cuts. The fabrics range from flannels and linens to shirtings and wovens. One thing to note, all of the pieces in this particular scrap pack are no larger than a foot square.

Every piece was clean, and most were pressed and edged by pinking shears. A few had some wrinkles and some thread bits, but all are in new condition.

If I had to guess I'd estimate I got about three yards of fabric total. It's the variety I think is so cool and inspiring.

The fact that I'm helping to keep these lovely fabrics out of a landfill also makes me very happy.

Here's everything all together. It's a generous amount of usable fabric.

Some of the swatch-size pieces do still have some sticky tape or bits of label fragments on them, as you see here with the flannel at the top. That's easy enough for me to remove. Also, two of the fabrics in my box probably came from finished garments, as you can tell from this olive piece at the bottom.

This other piece is double-layered, so it might be a trimmed-off pant leg. :)

If you like scraps and surprises, you simply can't beat Fabscrap. I made another order to see what the color-specific packs would be like, and I can't wait for it to arrive. When it does I'll post pics on the blog.