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Scrap Rehab

My ten dollar bag of vintage scraps needed to be hand-washed and picked through before I could use them, so I spent an afternoon last weekend working on that. This is one of the recycling chores I do that I really enjoy, as it's a little mindless and gives me time to think about other things.

I've worked with a lot of vintage textiles over the years, and I knew some of the scraps were so old they would have disintegrated in the washer even if I put them in a lingerie bag. I don't mind hand-washing them, or drying them on towels on the back porch table. It's weirdly soothing for me.

Once the scraps were clean and dry I needed to pick out all the snipped thread pieces left in the old hems to make them usable again. This is my favorite part of the process.

To illustrate what I mean, here's a green scrap with those threads snips from the original stitching still stuck in the folds. I pick them out using the tip of my seam ripper, or use a piece of adhesive tape if they're too small. This does take a long time, but now I won't have to worry about them when I use the scraps.

Here's all the threads I picked out from the pile. There's a lot of thinking that went along with pulling these. :)

Finally I pressed all the scraps and sorted them into colors. Now I have a clean, usable gallon size ziplock bag of beautiful vintage scraps, ready to be used.

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