Day 58: How to Organize Your Fabric
What: Organizing your fabric
Why: Fabric stashes sure are appealing to look at – if they are organized. Have you ever walked into a fabric store and just be mesmerized by the bolts of fabric lined up by color? Have you ever seen a picture online of perfectly and neatly organized stashes of fabric and wonder why yours doesn’t look the same? Fabric stashes take some inventorying at times and here is where it begins.
How:
1. Find all of the fabric you have (include batting in this as well).
2. Decide why you have each piece of fabric. If you are having a hard time deciding whether to keep a piece of fabric or not (like your scraps), decide WHY you haven’t used it yet. Is it hard to match? Is the fabric out of style? Would someone else find a better use for it? Whatever you no longer need, put it in a bag and donate it.
3. Take inventory of all of the fabric you have. Think about organizing it not by color, but by type because typically you make things of the same type of fiber – not just because it is the same color.
4. Make piles of each type of fiber.
5. Time to organize it! There are various ways to organize your fabric. Here are a few ideas.
- Buy comic boards. Wrap the fabric around each board and pin the ends. Store vertically in a row.
- Use a shoe storage hanger – good for fabric scraps (need to be small enough to fit in compartments
- Clear bins – you can see from all sides what is inside – if you have a lot of fabric, here you can store not only by fiber, but by color.
- Fold and just store in a pile.
- Roll the fabric and use pins to hold.
- Hang neatly folded fabric on a furniture ladder or string hung between two boards.
6. Find a project that you have been waiting to make and get started!
Confession of the Day: I used to keep every little scrap. I soon realized that all those little scraps would never go together to make something. Many of them were too small to donate even. Why I held onto them, I am unsure – I probably thought that “someday” would come. When I cleaned out my fabric, I knew what projects I had bought fabric for and which projects I needed to get started on. Living with less means lessening the “scraps” in life and realizing that we can’t do it all and shouldn’t do it all.
How do YOU organize your fabric? What project are you excited to start?
