Tiny Stuffed Things

What do you do with your scraps of quilt batting?  I buy my batting by the roll so I can always cut the perfect width of fabric, but the height is a different matter.  Sometimes the leftover is big enough for another project - if I'm lucky I can get a baby quilt from it, but mostly it goes to one of my mini quilts or cross-stitch minis.  But there comes a point when it's too small for even the smallest coaster.

When that happens, it's time to cut the batting into squares and make tiny stuffed things!  I aim for roughly 1 inch squares and when the item is stuffed and finished, you can't tell that it was filled with batting scraps instead of fiberfill.  This lets me make custom-sized pillow inserts with ease (I think the largest size that I've made is about 18") or I can make small items like these Perfect Pocket Pillows that I made last month.  The best part is, I never run out of stuffing!  When my kids were small and bored but big enough to use scissors they used to cut it up for me sometimes.

If I'm trimming a quilt and have skinny side strips left over, I'll cut it into squares right away and throw it into one of these brown bags.  I also have piles of wider batting waiting to be cut up and sometimes I'll snip one up while I'm thinking through a problem with a project or just procrastinating about something else.  Two bags is my limit though - once both are full, it's time to make something that needs to be stuffed!  My kids like to make crochet amigurumi so they help me keep the volume down (and they know where the "to be cut" pile of scraps is so they can cut their own if they need more than what the bags have).

I've also been experimenting with turning my seasonal cross-stitch projects into tiny cubes instead of flat cross-stitch projects.  This gives me more options when I'm decorating - it's easier to plop down a cube on a mantel or bookshelf instead of figuring out how to stand up a flat piece (my cross-stitch clothesline gets taken over by Christmas cards in December!).  This pattern is a free one from the Fat Quarter Shop called Jolly Tree Farm and they sent me the aida and floss to make it.

The easy part is boxing the corners to make a cube shape, the hard part is choosing the size of the box so that the entire stitched piece is still visible.  I make this a little easier by stitching my contrasting fabric (the gray in this example) in a frame around the cross-stitched part before making the box, but it still took a little trial and error before I got it right.

I know you can make Frankenbatting with the smaller pieces, but most of the ones I'm cutting up are 10" or less so that's a lot of seams to make a batting big enough for a whole quilt.  What do you do with your small batting scraps?