Here’s a fun Citrine I made a few weeks ago using leftover knit scraps from the sample Jade tees I made for the Jade launch back in 2018.

I save scraps of all sizes and fabric types, which add up to a LOT of scraps when you add up all of the years I’ve been sewing garments. Sometimes the scraps aren’t reusable or are too tiny to use (like selvages or the fluff that my serger creates) and I put them in a bin labeled “fabric trash” which will either become stuffing for a cushion - I wrote the Square Floor Cushion Tutorial in 2013 so that I could incorporate scraps into it as stuffing - or that I bring to my local recycle center’s textile waste bin. Small cotton scraps go to friend who quilt, and larger scraps go into boxes that I save for other projects, like this Cleo skirt that I made from scraps. My goal is always to minimize the amount of textile waste going into the landfill. Sidenote: I also do this with worn clothing from our house - we put all discarded clothing that is stained, torn, or full of holes into a separate textile waste bin to recycle rather than the trash.

All of that to say, after I made an assortment of colorful Jade tees when I released that pattern in 2018, I had small pieces of knit left over that weren’t big enough on their own for a full-sized garment. I had purchased multiple colors of the same fabric base (some sort of bamboo knit, I think? It’s pretty stretchy), so I started dreaming about how to create a fabric using pieces of each color.

Here is the pile I started with above. Then I pressed the pieces and cut 3.75” wide strips from each color; arranging them over top of the pattern pieces for Citrine to determine whether I had enough of each.

You can see that I ended up not incorporating the pink knit (which was left over from Clementine’s Twirly Flashback Dress OMG CUTE little Clem + matching doll pics!!!) - I actually think I have enough of that to make a small tee or tank top for her yet.

Then I used my serger to sew the strips together to create panels, cut out each of the panels, and sewed it all together!

You might be wondering how long all this takes. Typically the Citrine does not take me long to cut and sew; since I already have my pattern pieces traced, it takes me maybe about 30 minutes to cut the fabric and another 30 minutes to an hour to sew it all together with my serger (as long as I am not adding buttons, and depending on whether I have to gather or not for view b).

In this case, cutting the strips probably took about an hour, and sewing the strips together took maybe another hour (I had to go back and cut a few more scraps during this step). Not too bad since I was basically shopping my scrap pile to make it.

One last note: since this is a super-stretchy bamboo knit, I did interface the neckband and waistband with my favorite tricot interfacing, and used Wonder Tape AND basted the neckband in place before sewing it on. This was probably me being a bit paranoid, but after all of that strip-sewing (hmm sounds exciting, hee), I wanted to make sure the neckband looked nice and smooth and didn’t have little bumps every time I crossed a strip seam…LOLZ. Oy, Rae.