? about cutting up larger pieces of material into fq's...

[Heather]

Ok, this may be a silly question and I have been trying to wrap my brain around this!

The more I work with fat quarters the more I LOVE it (OK, CJ, it took me long enough eh?)and the thing is, I have LOTS of larger pieces of material. Would it be easier to cut them into fat quarters or just use them up as I need them?

[SewCrafty]

Good question Heather. I too have a lot of material in 1yd - 4yd amounts but after much thinking on this, decided to keep them in the larger pieces. If you need to make the long sashing for a quilt, the backing of a quilt or if you want to make bias tape, this will mean a lot less seams. JMO

[homesteadmamma]

Great question Heather.     First and foremost, you do need a few larger pieces for binding or sashing, BUT there are ways to work around that if you only have fat quarters.    Just means a bit more figuring when it comes to the sashing and doing it a bit differently.

For me, I've kept a few larger pieces that I use specifically for binding.    I like to have larger pieces, but even in binding you will have seams.    There is a little trick to that which I'll explain in the tutorial when I finish it.

For the backing of a quilt, you usually only use broadcloth for  that, so you wouldn't need to keep the larger pieces specifially for that.    Unless you wanted to make the backing very fancy, but doing it this way becomes quite expensive.    You might want to put a border though around your broadcloth on the back as described in the tutorial.

So, in my supplies of course I have way more fat quarters than larger pieces.    But I do have some large pieces that I'm keeping for sashing or binding.     Also, there are times when you will need to have a specific background for a quilt.     Lets say your doing a sample, and your background color is all one color and your doing more blocks than what I've given you in the tutorial.    You would need a large piece of material for that.     There are tons of sampler blocks that do that when making a sampler quilt.  Or lets say your doing a queen or king size Log Cabin quilt in 4 or 5 colors only.    Thats the time you'd want to have larger pieces of the same material.

And if your doing applique, you for sure need larger pieces if your using the same color for your background.

One thing I can say is that you seldom use more than 2 metres of any one color in any quilt.     So what you could do, is decide what material you want to keep in larger pieces and then cut 2 metres out of it, making the rest into fat quarters.   Just a thought.

HTH

[Missy]

I use both large pieces and fq's in my quilting. I like having the large pieces available to me for regular sewing and quilting as well. I like the large pieces for backing and sashing and making borders around my quilt. So if it were me, i might only cut a few fq's from some large pieces, if i cut them out at all.

[Heather]

Thank you SO much for your advice ladies.

I didn't know that about the 2 metres....I am going to be going through my fabric this weekend and will sort into 2 piles, keep larger and fq's.