In Service to the Scrap Bag

 
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For years I kept every fabric scrap that I produced in a huge W. German postal bag (the same one our Santa often toted growing up). My fantasy was to one day stuff a futon with the scraps and replace our couch- a long game to be sure. One day, as I was packing scraps into the bag, I realized I had so far to go before I could make a futon but not so far to go before my scraps outgrew our space. I think at the time I cried a lot upon coming to that realization. And then dumped the bag out, sorted my scraps, and had Tavi take the unusable majority to the dumpster while I scolded myself for being a terrible human on the earth.

Since that day I've devised a system of scraps. They are sorted into bags- linen, wool, denim, everything else.  I keep all pieces larger than 2"x2" and sometimes use the bags to retire fabrics I've used frequently or larger odd cuts that will make careful piecing a headache. The random bag mostly gets used for mending- scraps of cotton and silk and canvas. The wool bag I keep for stuffing, denim is for well... patching our jeans. But the linen scrap bag is my muse. It fills up periodically throughout the year and I empty it out and let the delicious constraints of random pieces and colors electrify my mind in a way little else does. 

This year I haven't sewn as much as in years past- I've had the time, but my brain has not cooperated. Although I've dipped into the linen scrap bag periodically for potholders and the like, it has remained an almost perfect archive of my sewing this last year. It was all summer piecing- bright colors, beach fueled visions. I've had a love affair with secondary colors in 2020, reveling in purples and oranges and leaning hard on sea-foamy greens. I see in these scraps butterfly weed and asters and prairie grasses. All of those colors, plus piles of plaid from a noble attempt to replace some of our handkerchiefs with hand-hemmed and hole-free ones made from linen button downs. There are scraps from the floral linen tablecloth one of my birthday gifts came wrapped in- a table cloth I had sidled up to some years ago at my friend's apartment and rubbed between my fingers and thought "I'd make a hell of a quilt out of this" (I'm sorry Kelsey, I can’t help it).

When I piece a quilt from scraps I go into a meditative zone. I can't really describe the process in a logical sense, my brain runs on a program I did not intentionally install. I fall back on senses of precision that I don't trust as deeply with a regular quilt- and it works out. I sew odd sides together and they align just so with the next piece. I work around and around and back and forth and a composition emerges almost independently of me, becoming visible just in time to guide me in fully fleshing it out. This top took two days of nearly silent non-stop work while Tav processed film on the other side of the room. Aside from a few greener grays that I left in the scrap bag it used all but the last millimeters of every scrap. It's not huge, and it's not square, but it is a whole object made from what seemed like infinite small, rumpled, twists of linen and I am taking a moment to feel like a genius for creating it. And now that the bag is mostly empty I am itching to plan a new top full of stars or triangles, to create scraps, to start again, because a scrap quilt cannot be faked and it is the deepest joy of my practice, one I won't get to experience again until I've made a few more quilts (and scraps).

Grace Rother