House Post: Fabric Organizing

You know you were taught to sew by a child of the Great Depression when you spend your Sunday morning organizing your fabric.

First pass was to put the untouched fabric together by type: fleece, cotton, flannel, other. At least the easily accessible yardage. Please note, to protect the innocent, I’m not showing you pictures of my craft closet. Maybe someday I’ll have the courage to share public photos of the before & after. If I ever get to an after. Assume what you’re seeing is 1/4 of my total fabric stash, aka the part that got organized today.

Second pass was a thorough rifling through of mumblemumble bags of true scraps, the little bits leftover after I finished a project, that I just stuck in a bag and then stuck full bags in the closet. Yeah, I know. I’m atoning for my sins now.

Those scraps got separated into four piles:

• trash: the smallest, for truly irredeemable tiny shreds of cotton and other fabric;
• usable scraps, cotton and flannel: the next-largest, for pieces that could be cut up for quilt squares
• unusable scraps, fleece and flannel: the second-largest, for any and all uncuttable fleece and flannel scraps, into a grocery bag to stuff into the dog bed
• usable yardage: for anything that could have something else cut out of it, trimmed of hanging bits, folded, and fit carefully into a new box.

Whew.

I’m not done yet, but I have a system and the wind in my sails, and I’ll plug away at it for ~15 minutes or so a day. I also have a plan to better store the fleece yardage, which takes up the most room by far, and will execute that after a trip to the store to buy the right kind of tupperware.