I love the designer fabric as much as the next girl (if not more), but when I can’t afford it I have to use something. Here are five of my favorite ways of pulling fabric out of thin air.
- Your linen closet. Take those ugly old sheets, dye them with RIT, and boo-ya. New yardage.
- Your clothes closet. Take everything that doesn’t fit or is stained or holey. Slice shirts and pants up the seams, open them up and square them off with your clear acrylic ruler and rotary blade. Cut out the stained or holey bits. Then cut everything into rectangles, fold, and add to your stash. Save the leftover scraps in your scrap basket.
- Your unfinished projects pile. Either finish that project or rip out the stitches and reuse the fabric for something else.
- Your windows. Half of my good home-dec weight fabric came from the last 30” trimmed off the bottom of my Ikea curtains.
- your friends and neighbors. Let them know you love to sew, and you’ll become known as Our Friend Or Relative Who Sews. Then whenever people come into fabric — from work, from Grandma, God knows what — they think of you first.
- Enter sewing blog contests for free fat quarters and the like. Hey, dude, it’s like the lottery. Somebody’s gotta win.
#4 - Ikea makes their curtains so long. Sometimes annoying, but that extra fabric is pretty great.
I know, right? 98” I think. I only use all of that if I hang them right under the ceiling.
Brilliant! I love dying things (although Dylon is my favorite now) and cannibalizing clothes is such a great idea (and a great way to get buttons and zippers for free). And I will never let those long IKEA curtains bother me again!
Oooh, Dylon! I’ve always wanted to try that, but RIT just calls out to me when I’m grocery shopping.
I love, love reusing zippers. I just made a zippered pillow using a long dress zipper. Cuts like an hour off my sewing time and it looks cool.
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Another place—furniture stores. Those sample rings get thrown away every season. My friend works at one and is happy to pass them along. Not all of it will be the right weight, but I got lots of good cottons.
Those long Ikea curtains are designed for European windows… freaked me out when I had to buy fabric to cover the windows when we lived in Belgium! But I do have gorgeous lace curtains from the time we lived in Germany… they have been cut down a few times to fit different windows in different places we’ve lived over the years.