Organizing Your Fabric Stash
This year one of my big goals is to use more of my fabric stash. After all, I have all of this beautiful fabric that I have bought. I should use it in some projects. Of course the biggest hurdle in “shopping your stash” is actually getting it organized enough to have an idea of what you have. At the end of last year I went through and finally did a major overhaul totally reorganizing my fabric collection. Before going into it I looked up and read about how different people had stored their fabric, organizational systems they had used and more. What I determined is that no one system developed by someone else was going to work for me but I could pull ideas from everyone and develop a system that works for me. So what I have decided to do is rather than give you yet another organizational system, I am going to give you a series of questions to ask before you even start sorting to help you create the perfect organizational system for you. So without further or do here we go:
1.Do you have a wide range of fabric substrates?
If you make primarily quilts the majority of your fabric is probably quilting cotton, but if you also do bag making, clothing making or any other sewing you may have a wider range of fabric substrates (or types of fabric) in your collection. If you have a wide range of fabric substrates it may make sense to organize based on fabric substrates, or at least in part. For example when I organized my collection,wool, flannel, batiks, knits/denims (for garment making) and canvas/decororater weight (for bags) were all separated out from the rest of the quilting cotton. This allows me to quickly find materials for specific projects.
2.Do you have any designer’s whose fabric you collect, or tend to use exclusively in projects?
Most people tend to buy fabric by certain designers repeatedly, because they love their style. When you use fabric by a designer do you tend to use their fabric exclusively in the project, and do you mix and match between collections. A great example of this is Tula Pink, all of her collections tend to work with one another, but the colors don’t necessarily work with other outside collections. When I was organizing I only pulled fabric from three designers out separately, the first being Tula Pink, and the second Alison Glass and the third Guicy Guice. In three cases the collections these designers develop all work with one another, basically any Alison Glass fabric will go with any other Alison Glass fabric. Because of this I found it better to have fabrics from these designers separate from the rest of sort.
3.When creating a fabric pull what do you look for first? Is it color, pattern or something else?
I always look at color when I am creating a fabric pull, but I know some people look for subject matter (florals for example). You may also have a mix of these two systems sometimes needing to pull by subject matter and sometimes by color. Can you create a list of specific subjects that work for you, or isolate the handful of subjects that you tend to look for? How detailed do you want your color sort to be? For my fabric I only pulled out three subject matters: Holidays, florals and Disney. For colors I had White, Gray, Black, Yellow, Orange, Red, Purple, Blue, Green, Brown, and Indeterminate. That final category was for anything that had too many colors to fit into one of the others and also didn’t fit into one of the subject matters.
4.Do you have precuts? How do you use them?
I have the feeling just about every quilter has precuts, but if you don’t you don’t have to worry about this question and can just move on. The second part, how you use them is really the key part in how to sort your precuts. When you go looking, are you typically searching for a specific type of precut, or do you still look based on the system ideas mentioned in Question 3? I for example go in looking for specific types of precuts, so I have them organized separately from the rest of the quilting cottons and sorted by type.
5.When does material become too small to be yardage (i.e. when does it become a scrap)?
This is a difficult question to answer, but you really need to be honest with yourself about it. I know I tend to want to hold onto fabric that isn’t enough to be used in a quilt but all that ends up happening is it takes up space and makes it more difficult to actually find the fabric you need. It took me a while but I finally realized that anything smaller than an ⅛ of a yard would be classified as scrap (we will deal with scraps in the next question), and not sorted into the general fabric collection.
6.Do you use your scraps?
I think the answer to this depends largely on what type of quilter you are. If you do a lot of improv work or tiny foundation paper piecing scraps are a regular part of your fabric collection. But what about everyone else? Think about the last time you used your scraps, how did you use them, what size were they, was it a planned use? I don’t do a lot of improv work, but I do keep two sets of scraps out at all times. One is the never ending scraps from a bundle that I use for classes when I need patterned fabric. The second is a collection of solid and low volume prints in different colors that can be used for small details in foundation paper piecing. The rest of my scraps I cut down into squares (of varying sizes) for traditional piecing projects and hexagons for English paper piecing projects.
7.Do you have kits?
Last question, do you have quilt kits or fabric that you have specifically purchased for a quilt pattern. If you have quilt kits do you store them separately with the pattern and all the other materials? I personally like to keep everything all together and the kits on a shelf where I can see them and easily pull one when I am ready to work on it.
Based on how you answered these questions, you will have a much better idea of how you actually use your fabric, which makes organizing it an easier process. Go over your answers and decide how best to sort everything out, and from there match up with the storage options that you have. Drawers, cubes, boxes and more all work, just make sure it fits into your space. I would love to see how you have organized your fabric, if you post on Instagram please tag me @createdesignmake365 . Coming up I am going to be sharing some great ways to adapt patterns for your stash.
Until next time,
Siobhan, CDM365 Studios
