No, I’m not intending to figure out how to make my favorite thanksgiving dish out of table scraps. Yet. My new scrap-busting adventure is to turn all the pieces that were too small to be used in my patchwork waistcoat into stuffed animal filler. Why bother buying polyfill when all this free stuffing is right at my fingertips, if only I can figure out how to use it….

This one is a pretty short update. I tried, I really tried to find a clever way to shred all my scraps, to no avail. The fabric just got tangled around the blades in the blender, my kitchen mandolin couldn’t cut through them, and the paper shredder jammed. Then I had to clean out all the instruments I’d tried and failed to use on this stuff.

So I wound up just using my rotary cutter.

I laid out some of the scrap fabric on my cutting mat so that it made single layer taking up most of the mat. Then I took my rotary cutter and ran over the whole rough sheet of scrap fabric to form a set of tight vertical cuts running through the scraps. I rotated the mat 90° and ran over everything with the cutter again to form a thin grid. I gathered up the resulting irregular shreds and stuffed them in a bag.

Then I repeated the process. And repeated and repeated and repeated it. It took hours to finish just one bin of scrap. It’s still the best that I could come up with.

Anyway, it worked and it reduced a whole bin full of scrap down to two bags of stuffing.

Which were then ready to go into stuffed animals. There’s nothing much to add after this point. I used some free plushie patterns I found on Pinterest, an Appa and a turtleduck, both by Choly Knight. The only thing to add is that the scrap-fabric stuffing is quite a bit denser than poly-fill, using this for the turtleduck body and poly-fill for the head might fix the balance issue the duck has without requiring a weighted bag, as suggested in the pattern.

The results are adorable.