A scrap quilt succeeds or fails on one decision, and it isn't which scraps you use. It's what you do to hold them together. Every scrap quilt you've ever admired has something running through it that all the fabrics share, and every scrap quilt that looks like a pile of leftovers is missing that one thing. This guide is about finding it, sorting the scraps you already own, and sewing them into a quilt that looks like you meant it.
What a scrap quilt is, and the argument about what counts
A scrap quilt is made from small pieces and offcuts, pieced together in an arrangement you choose. That's the whole definition, and it's deliberately loose. The pieces can come from fabric you bought last week or from a bin you've been filling for nine years.
There's a long-running disagreement about the second part. For some quilters a true scrap quilt is one where little or no new fabric was bought for the project, and buying a background to tie it together disqualifies it. For others the word is about how the quilt looks, so a quilt made entirely from new fat quarters cut small still counts, because it reads as scrappy.
You don't have to settle that argument to make one. But it's worth knowing which camp you're in before you start, because it decides whether you're allowed to buy the one thing that would make the quilt easier. Most of the quilts in this guide buy something.
The random approach is the purest version. Build two piles, one of darks and one of lights, and take from each in turn as you sew, without looking too hard. You'll end up with color combinations you'd never have chosen on purpose, and some of them will be the best thing in the quilt.
What to do with fabric scraps
Before the quilt, the triage. Not everything in the bin deserves to be kept, and keeping all of it is what makes the bin unusable.
Scraps come from more places than your own projects. Offcuts from other quilts, the ends of yardage, pieces cut from old clothing and household textiles. If you're using worn fabric, take the parts that haven't been worn: shirt tails, the inside of a hem, the back of a skirt. A quilt outlives the reason you made it, and a thin patch will go first.
Then there's the other category, the one most quilters have and don't count as scraps at all: the units and blocks left over from projects that ended. A stack of half square triangles you trimmed too many of. Four blocks from a quilt that turned out to need twelve. Those aren't scraps, they're a head start, and a scrap quilt is the only setting that will take them without complaint. If they're different sizes, sashing brings them all up to a size you can piece together.
What to throw away: anything smaller than your smallest kept size, anything you disliked enough that you'd never place it in a quilt, and anything with a fold line you can't press out. Fabric you'll never use is costing you shelf space and nothing else.
How to sort and store scraps
The single change that turns a scrap bin into a working resource is this: sort by size, not by color. Color sorting looks beautiful on a shelf and helps you not at all, because when you sit down to sew you need a 2 1/2 inch strip, and you don't care what color it is yet.
Sherri McConnell of A Quilting Life has been working this way for years, and her method is worth copying whole. Everything goes into one bin while a project is running. When the bin fills, or when she needs it for something else, she sorts.
The sort has two passes. First, pull out every light and low volume print and put it in its own pile, because backgrounds get stored separately from colored prints and you'll be reaching for them constantly. Second, sort what's left by size alone: large pieces, medium pieces, strips, small bits. Don't measure and don't deliberate. As she puts it, if you don't just get it done then you'll never get it done.
Only then do you cut. The large pieces become fat eighths where they're big enough, strips where they're not. The mediums become squares. The rest becomes strips and whatever squares fit, and everything goes into the bin for its size.
The sizes worth keeping
A scrap system needs a fixed list of sizes, or you'll end up cutting a new size for every project and storing all of them. Five covers almost everything:
- 2 1/2 inch strips, cut to whatever length the piece gives you. These feed strip sets, rail fence, log cabin and binding.
- 2 1/2 inch squares, the four patch and nine patch size.
- 5 inch squares, the charm size, which also cuts down to four 2 1/2 inch squares when you need them.
- Fat eighths, for anything big enough to still be a piece of fabric rather than a scrap.
- Finished units, kept by size: half square triangles, flying geese, strip sets. Label the size, because you will not remember it.
The 5 inch square is doing more work in that list than it looks. It's the size the industry settled on for precut charm squares, so anything you cut to 5 inches drops straight into a pattern written for a charm pack, and anything left over from a charm pack drops straight into your bin. One size, two directions.
The five ways to unify a scrap quilt
A scrap quilt needs one element that every block shares, and there are five things that element can be. Pick one, or pick two. Picking none is how you end up with a quilt that reads as noise.
A common background
The most reliable of the five. One light fabric, or one family of light fabrics, appearing in every block. The background gives the prints space from each other, which is exactly what busy fabrics need, and it gives your eye somewhere to rest between them.
It doesn't have to be white. A gray tone on tone works, and so does a low volume print with a small figure in it. What matters is that it's consistently lighter, or consistently darker, than everything it sits beside. A background that lands in the same value range as the prints stops functioning as a background and becomes just another fabric in the mix.
You can also run this in reverse, with a dark common fabric and the scraps reading light against it. The effect is heavier and the prints look more jewel-like. Our solids are the straightforward version of either approach, since a solid can't fight with anything.
Sashing and cornerstones
Sashing separates the blocks with strips of a single fabric, and cornerstones are the small squares where the sashing crosses. Between them they'll unify almost any collection of blocks, because the eye reads the grid first and the contents second.
This is also the fix for mismatched block sizes. Frame the small blocks with wider sashing and the large ones with narrower, and they'll all finish the same. Of the five, it's the one that solves a construction problem at the same time.
One repeated element in every block
Something small, in the same place, in every block. A center square in one color. The same fabric in the four corners. One shared print that appears once per block and nowhere else.
It doesn't have to be identical every time. A hexagon flower quilt built over four years can have a yellow center in every flower, a different yellow in each one, and it will still hold together. Your eye is reading the position and the color family. It never gets as far as the print.
A single color range
Instead of a shared fabric, a shared temperature. All the cool colors, or all the warm ones. Pinks, limes, aquas and yellows together, with the reds chosen only where they lean cool.
This one lets you be much busier than the others allow, because the restriction is doing the work at a level below the pattern. A quilt in this mode can have fifty prints in it and still look considered. It's also the hardest to judge from inside your own stash, since it requires saying no to fabrics you like. If you're unsure where a fabric sits, our guide on choosing quilt fabric by value has the squint test and the photograph test.
Enough variety that it stops mattering
Past a certain number of different fabrics, a quilt stops reading as a set of individual choices and starts reading as texture. Dark reds sitting beside bright reds stop looking like a mistake, because nothing in the quilt is claiming to match anything else.
Block exchanges produce this naturally. So does a quilt built from a genuinely deep scrap bin. The threshold is higher than most people expect, though, and this is the one place scrap quilts usually go wrong: a quilt with twelve fabrics looks accidental, and a quilt with a hundred and twenty looks intentional. If you're between the two, add one of the other four unifiers rather than hoping.
A strong binding helps at this end of the scale. A single decisive fabric around the edge pulls a wild center together, and it's the last chance to impose order on a quilt that doesn't have much.
Blocks that suit scraps
The blocks that work here are the ones that stay recognizable no matter what fabric goes into them.
One patch designs come first, meaning a quilt built from a single repeated shape with no piecing inside it. Squares, rectangles, triangles, diamonds, hexagons. There's no block to get wrong, the cutting is one measurement, and every scrap that reaches the minimum size qualifies. If you've never made a quilt before, this is where to start, and the complete beginner's guide covers the parts that come after the top is pieced.
Half square triangles are the next step up and the most useful unit in scrap quilting, because a pair of them holds a light and a dark together in a fixed relationship. Sort your scraps into two value piles, pair one from each, and the quilt designs itself. Our half square triangle guide has three methods and the size chart, and the four at a time method is the one to use when you're working through a bin.
The nine patch and the four patch take 2 1/2 inch squares directly from storage with no cutting at all. The rail fence does the same for strips. The pinwheel and the friendship star both tessellate, which means the blocks interlock across the quilt and produce a secondary pattern you didn't draw.
Log cabin deserves its own mention. It's the traditional scrap block, it eats strips of any length, and the light side and dark side give you a built in unifier before you've chosen a single fabric.
Settings: straight, on point, tessellating, medallion
The setting is how the blocks are arranged, and it changes a scrap quilt more than the blocks do.
Straight setting is blocks in rows, edge to edge or separated by sashing. It's the most common arrangement and the easiest to plan, and with scraps it puts all the attention on the fabrics.
On point turns every block forty five degrees. The same squares that look plain in rows look considered on the diagonal, which is why so many antique scrap quilts use it. You pay for it with setting triangles at the edges, and the math for those is in the pattern section below.
Alternating puts a plain block between each pieced one. Half the piecing, twice the quilting space, and the pieced blocks get room to be seen. For a scrap quilt this is a quiet way to control a busy top.
Tessellating repeats one unit so the shapes interlock and the pattern looks endless. Friendship stars and tumbling blocks both do this.
Medallion builds outward from a center in rounds. Use this one if you're nervous about scraps, for a practical reason: you add a round at a time and judge it before committing to the next. If a round is wrong you've lost a round, not a quilt.
Charm quilts, and where the five inch square came from
A charm quilt is a scrap quilt with one extra rule: every single piece is a different fabric. No repeats anywhere in the top. Nineteenth century quilters set themselves the target of a thousand different fabrics in one quilt, which meant swapping with everyone they knew, and that swapping is most of why the tradition survived.
The shape is almost always simple, because the rule is the hard part. Squares, rectangles, triangles. One patch designs again.
The word survived into the fabric industry, which is why a pack of 5 inch squares is called a charm pack. The modern version isn't quite a charm quilt in the old sense, since the squares in one pack come from a single collection and were designed to agree with each other. But a quilt made from six different charm packs, cut apart and shuffled, gets remarkably close, and it's the fastest route to the look if your scrap bin isn't deep yet.
Turning it into a quilt: sizes and yardage
Scrap quilts are usually planned backward from the pile rather than forward from a size, which is fine until you need to buy a background and don't know how much.
Counting in 5 inch squares makes this easy, because a charm pack holds forty two of them. A throw sized top of roughly 45 by 57 inches takes 111 squares, so three packs with a few left over, or three good handfuls from a sorted bin. A baby quilt takes 50, which is more than most people expect to already own and usually have.
Background and sashing are the parts you'll buy. A throw's worth of setting triangles takes about half a yard, and if your design also has sashing, a yard and a half covers both with room to correct a cutting mistake. Backing takes about 3 3/4 yards of 42 inch backing fabric for a throw, pieced in two widths, or one length of wide backing, or nothing bought at all if you piece the back from scraps too, which is traditional and looks good. Binding takes 3/8 of a yard, or nothing if you make it from leftover strips.
Buy the background last. Cut and lay out the blocks first, then take a photograph of the layout, then take the photograph to the fabric. Choosing the unifier before you know what it has to unify is how people end up with two yards of the wrong cream.
The free scrap quilt pattern
The pattern sheet below is a one patch scrap quilt in 5 inch squares, on point, with the cutting figured for four sizes. It's the plainest possible use of a scrap bin and it's the one we'd start anybody on, because there's no block to piece and the diagonal set does all the work.
The numbers, if you'd rather work them out yourself than print anything. A 5 inch square finishes at 4 1/2 inches, and turned on point it measures 4 1/2 times 1.414 across, which is a hair under 6 3/8 inches. Multiply that by the number of squares in each direction and you have the finished size.
- Baby, 31 7/8 by 38 1/8 inches: 50 squares, 5 side triangles squares, 2 corner squares
- Throw, 44 1/2 by 57 1/4 inches: 111 squares, 7 side triangle squares, 2 corner squares
- Twin, 50 7/8 by 76 3/8 inches: 173 squares, 9 side triangle squares, 2 corner squares
- Queen, 76 3/8 by 82 3/4 inches: 288 squares, 12 side triangle squares, 2 corner squares
Side triangles fill the stepped edges and are cut from 7 3/4 inch squares, quartered on both diagonals, four triangles per square. Corner triangles are cut from 4 1/4 inch squares, cut once on one diagonal, two per square. Both numbers come from the standard formulas: finished block times 1.414 plus 1 1/4 for the side triangles, finished block divided by 1.414 plus 7/8 for the corners. Cutting them this way puts the straight grain on the outside edge of the quilt, which is the whole reason for the two different cuts.
Sew the quilt in diagonal rows, not in horizontal ones. Lay the whole top out first, press the seams in alternating directions row by row, and join the rows last. Trim the outside edges only after everything is joined, leaving a quarter inch beyond the block points so they don't get cut off at the binding.
Take the whole pattern with you
All of it is written out in a nine page PDF called Every Last Piece: the cutting for all four sizes, the two setting triangle cuts with the arithmetic behind them, the layout diagram, the order the diagonal rows go together in, and the formula for any size we haven't listed. It prints on letter or A4, and nothing on it needs to print at actual size, because there are no templates in this quilt.
The PDF is here: the Every Last Piece scrap quilt pattern. It's free to print, use and teach, and the quilts you make from it are yours to sell. No email, no login, nothing to buy.
Scrap quilt questions we are asked most
How many different fabrics do I need for a scrap quilt?
More than you think, or fewer, depending on which unifier you're using. With a common background you can make a good quilt from fifteen prints. With no unifier at all you need something past a hundred before the variety itself starts holding it together. The uncomfortable middle is twenty to forty fabrics with nothing shared, which is where most disappointing scrap quilts live.
Do the fabrics need to be the same weight?
Broadly yes. Quilting cottons of similar weight behave the same under the needle and wash the same afterward. You can mix in a heavier fabric if it's a small proportion and it's distributed across the quilt rather than clustered, but flannel and quilting cotton in the same top will shrink at different rates and pull the quilt out of square in the first wash.
Should I prewash scraps?
Decide once and apply it to the whole quilt. Mixing prewashed and unwashed fabric in one top means the unwashed pieces shrink at the first wash and the prewashed ones don't, and the quilt puckers unevenly. With scraps from many sources you often can't tell, so the safer answer with old or unknown fabric is to wash it all.
What size squares are best for a scrap quilt?
Five inches is the most useful single size, because it's the precut standard and it subdivides cleanly into 2 1/2 inch squares. If your scraps are mostly small, 2 1/2 inches gets more of them into the quilt but roughly quadruples the number of seams. Larger than 5 inches and most scraps stop qualifying.
How do I keep a scrap quilt from looking messy?
Pick one of the five unifiers and apply it without exception. The quilts that look messy usually applied a unifier to most of the blocks and then made an exception for one fabric that was too nice to leave out. That block reads as a slip, not a flourish.
Can I use scraps for the backing?
Yes, and it's traditional. A pieced back from large scraps is the most common use for the pieces that are too big to be scraps and too small to be yardage. Keep the seams away from where you expect the heaviest quilting, press them open rather than to one side to reduce bulk, and make the backing at least four inches larger than the top on every side.
What do I do with scraps too small to cut a 2 1/2 inch square from?
String piecing takes them. You sew narrow strips of any length onto a foundation, trim the block to size afterward, and the foundation means the strips never need to be measured or matched. It's the oldest answer to this question and it's still the best one. Anything smaller than a string goes in the bin for stuffing or goes out.
How long does a scrap quilt take compared to a planned one?
The sewing is the same or faster, since the blocks are usually simpler. The extra time is at the front, in sorting and cutting, and that's time you spend once and then reuse for every scrap quilt afterward. The first one feels slow. The fourth one starts on the day you decide to make it.
Do scrap quilts hold up as well as other quilts?
They hold up as well as the weakest fabric in them, which is the argument for being selective about worn clothing. A scrap quilt made from sound quilting cotton has no structural disadvantage at all. One made with a few thin patches will fail at those patches, and the rest of the quilt will still be fine around the holes.
What to have ready
A sharp rotary blade, because a dull one drags on small pieces and you'll be making a great many of them. A square ruler large enough for your chosen size. A pressing surface you can reach without standing up, since scrap piecing is a long sequence of small presses. Thread in a neutral gray, which disappears against both light and dark scraps better than either white or black. All of that lives in notions, and the thread is worth matching to the piecing rather than to any one fabric.
Sort out the storage before you start. Five containers, labeled with the five sizes. A sorted bin is the difference between a scrap quilt you plan and a scrap quilt you never quite begin.
Where to start
Sort one bin. Just one, and use the two pass method: lights and low volumes out first, then everything else by size. Don't measure and don't deliberate, because the sorting is the part people abandon.
Then count what you have in 5 inch squares. If it's over fifty, you have a baby quilt in the bin already. Choose your unifier before you cut anything else, buy the background last, and set the squares on point.
If the sorting turns up finished blocks from projects you never completed, you're in luckier shape than you think. We wrote about finishing the projects you started separately, and a scrap quilt is one of the few places orphan blocks can go without being unpicked first.
