First let me say that I believe that the way to get the most out of your fabric when fussy cutting is to create layer stacks. That is what I have been doing for awhile now. That being said, I didn’t start out with layer stacks. When I first started to fussy cut I used a single layer of yardage and eyeballed each repeat. That took a great deal of time and effort. Plus I was left with pieces of fabric resembling Swiss cheese that were hard to manipulate. It is much harder to search the surface of a long piece of yardage for six identical portions than it is to manipulate a stack one sixth the size and cut only on piece.

Here we have a piece of fabric from the Laurel Burch Embracing Horses collection that I have been using for my Glorious Hexagons. I started off isolating repeats of either densely packed circles or triangles. After that I moved on to isolating single circles or triangles. Then I tried isolating more empty areas of the pattern. The resultant Swiss cheese wonder appear above.

I wanted to cut some 3 inch triangles from this fabric without regard to the pattern. I was going to just treat it as a tone on tone, albeit a fairly contrasty tone on tone. To my displeasure there were no areas large enough to cut a 3 inch triangle. I decided to cut 1.5 inch triangles and piece them to make 3 inch triangles. I managed to find a great many areas of the fabric that were large enough for the 1.5 inch triangle template.

 

I managed to cut a great many of these 1.5 inch shapes.

Here are a few of them basted and read to assemble.

I actually had enough shapes to make six 3 inch pieced triangles with a few pieces remaining. By this point fabric was taking on a “holier than though” attitude. Yet it seemed to have enough life left in it to yield up some even smaller shapes. I searched for the smallest shape I could find, the 1 inch triangle template, and cut what I could.

Here are the results. These pieces will come in handy for blocks that require small triangles.

Trust me when I say that there is nothing of value left here. The remaining scraps were tossed without regret.

Rest assured that the next time I use this fabric for fussy cutting a layer stack will be involved.