Here it is! The long-awaited crumb piecing tutorial. There are some preliminary things I’ll cover here in this post, and then there’s a looong video, included below, to give you a look inside my crumb piecing brain.
I absolutely love crumb piecing. I find it almost meditative… sitting at my machine, matching small pieces of fabric to other small pieces of fabric, taking joy in lovely fabric combos in tiny pieces. It’s free form. It’s easy. There’s something about the quiet repetitiveness of it that is very calming for me. And after a few minutes at my sewing machine, I’ve created some really fun blocks or even a piece of fabric I can use to make something wonderful.
To get started, the first thing I did was dig into my big bucket of scraps and sort out some Kaffe Fassett Collective scraps that are perfect for crumb piecing.

I decided to go with all KFC fabric scraps, but I’ve done crumb piecing before with only batik scraps. You can use any fabrics you like and mix and match any way you like. You could select fabrics from all one color family (like all reds, or all blues, etc…), you could do all black and white, or you could do all one color family with an occasional pop of a contrasting color thrown in.
I pulled out some smaller pieces, anywhere from about 1.5×2 inches all the way up to 2.5 x 3 inches or so. Squares, rectangles, triangles, irregular shapes, they all work. I also pulled out some strips.


The video will show some good images of the type of pieces I’m using and how I piece them.
Once I had my pieces selected, I pressed them all and sorted them according to size and shape: larger pieces, smaller pieces, irregular pieces. Then I sat down at the sewing machine and got started.
Before you dive into the video, the one thing I want you to remember is that there are no rules in crumb piecing. Nothing has to line up, no seams have to match, no shapes have to be a particular shape. So relax, have some fun, sew some fabric together, and dive in!
Ok, I promised you that I’d show you some things that can be made with crumb piecing. So here we go.
This quilt is probably my favorite of all I’ve ever made. I haven’t had it quilted yet, but it will stay with me when it’s done. I made crumb blocks and squared them up to 8 inches and then added borders and sashing.

You can also use crumb piecing to make a bag. Either make the bag out of entirely crumb pieced fabric like this one…

Or use various sized crumb blocks like in these Frankenbags.



Here’s a deconstructed look at how you can incorporate crumb blocks in a bag:

I made this batik wall hanging out of crumb blocks.

I later cut this wall hanging into four pieces and made two Frankenbags. Here’s one of them.

I hope the video is clear. Let me know if you have any questions or need clarifications.