Thursday, March 3, 2011

Fabric...

If you don't like blog posts about fabric, you can skip this one. Remember I said after reading Jeni's series The Art of Choosing, I decided to organize my stash in a more efficient way. Well, it took me all week. I touched every piece of fabric I own, weeded out some oldies, folded every one into a neat little package and organized by color.I chose to organize my fabrics within each color by grouping tone-on-tones and color + white together; then grouping color + accent color together. So all the blue with green went together, all the aqua with red together, brown with blue, etc. I think it will make it easier to pull coordinates for a project. I ended up with these bins from Target. They held 2 rows of folded fabric and fit perfectly on my large shelf. (I even went to Lowe's to have additional shelves cut).
My fabric had been previously stacked on these shelves. Now they're holding my books, multicolored fabrics and creams. I've also got a little overflow of grays and black & whites. I'm going to try to follow Peter Walsh's advice to stay within my bins!
I've been collecting gray fabrics and I've learned that I have "enough already!"
But I'm really short on purple and plum. 4 pieces! And the second one on the right is really more pink!
I'm loving the fact that when I needed some pinks today I could just pull the bin to my cutting table and use what I needed.
It took a lot of time to reorganize but I do have a whole new vision of what I have on hand. It was really fun as I folded and admired each of my lovely fabrics. Very Zen! Thanks Jeni for the push!

Look what came today. A few more AMH voiles for my project...
And as long as I was ordering, I just had to add some Spring Street. It's luscious!!

10 comments:

  1. I'm doing better at plum, but still am really low on pink. Just not a fave. I have too much green and aqua!!

    So fun to see your hard work pay off!

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  2. I really need to do this...spend a whole week...look at every piece of fabric. It just seems overwhelming. And do you keep any together by group...the new pieces? Also, what about smaller pieces...say smaller than a fat quarter or bigger than a layer cake?

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  3. Yay for you!!!! My stash isn't extensive at all...most of my color ranges only have 4-6 pieces each in them. I did, however, separate all of my collections and merge them. I agreed with Jeni's comment...if you want to do something with them again...you can put them back together.

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  4. Great job getting all your fabric sorted. I did this awhile back...but I must admit I haven't been great keeping up the system. I've gone back to pushing and shoving the fabric back in! So naughty of me!

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  5. This was just the eye candy I needed today! Thanks for sharing!

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  6. Looks great and it will be so easy to coordinate things now. Good job.

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  7. After reading your post on this earlier last week I also went through and folded all my lovely fabric. It was nice to remember what was on hand. I have yet to organize by color, as we're switching up where sewing stuff is going. Thanks for the pics on yours!

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  8. How do you know how much fabric to buy? Do you always get fat quarters? Do you have a pattern in mind, or just buy for stash? It looks like you only buy fqs. Do you stick to patterns that only require a quarter yard each?

    I wonder about these things when I read stash organizing posts, because I buy bigger cuts that would never fit neatly like yours have!

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  9. Do you sort by length? Or just color? I'm interested in these things because I'll be moving and getting a new sewing room in the foreseeable future, and I plan to have that one more organized than the current one! :)

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  10. I'm like you with the gray obsession. A couple years ago it seemed really hard to find gray fabric, so I started buying a little whenever I found some I liked. Now it's much more popular and easier to come across, which makes me happy.

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