FARN: my own coined term for fabric yarn. I first wrote a post about it in the early days of my blog. I’m now back to making some, this time from a pile of knit fabric scraps that I sorted out a couple months ago. I went through my entire stash of knit scrap leftovers, and came up with 2 piles: what was usable for apparel making, and what wasn’t. The “what wasn’t” pile was set aside to be made into Farn.
Here’s the pile of scraps I started with:
It’s a varied assortment that consists of: lightweight jersey, shiny spandex, stretch velvet, sweater knit and furry knit. Pieces I’ve made clothing from in the past and couldn’t bring myself to throw out. There were some big differences in fabric weight here, but I was determined to make them work.
I began by straightening odd shaped pieces out so they’d line up with one another:
Some pieces were very thin material so I folded them double. When I’d evened everything out the pile had a much neater, organized look:
Next came the actual piecing: sewing all the straightened pieces together to make one long line:
I ended up with a long line of fabric that was a little wider on one end and narrower on the other, however even the narrow end was wide enough to require folding before sewing. Also, the furry fabrics and sweater knit needed to be sealed due to fraying ends and shedding.
I made a tri fold, secured it with sewing clips and began sewing:
A short ways in, I had a new idea. Since the Farn was turning out rather wide, why not fill it with some of my leftover quilt batting scraps? I cut the batting scraps into strips the width of the center fold of the Farn, inserted it, and sewed it in as I went along:
The batting shored up the Farn and made it less thin and floppy. It gave it structure and poof. Now I was not only upcycling my fabric scraps, but also my unused batting was given a new purpose. I was really pleased about this. There’s something really satisfying about finding a use for unused materials!
Finally, here’s 3 pics of the finished ball of Farn:
Pretty cool huh? I feel that I really made order out of chaos!
It wasn’t the most enjoyable sewing experience, there were a lot of bulky seams to deal with and it was quite tedious at times, but it was worth the effort.
FARN: a way to tackle your scrap pile.
Take care and thanks for reading 🙂
Sewcoordinated 