Organizing My Fabric

Oh was it ever time to organize my fabric! All my lovelies practically cried out to me each time I passed them because everything was so haphazard and thrown together.

My fabric has gone through quite the organizational gamut over the past 4 years. Once I began doing applique my stash practically exploded overnight and desperately cried out for storage.

This was my little corner of the world a few years ago {that seriously feels like ages ago}. I started off organizing the fabric in the clear shoe bins from The Container Store. It didn't really work, so I ended up returning them. It was a pain having to pull so many pieces of fabric out at a time and I had to refold everything I pulled out.
My next step was organizing it on this shelf. You can read the details here but I pretty much bought comic book boards on Amazon and wrapped my fabric around them. I also go into detail about how I organize my ribbon and scrap fabric in that post. I still do it the same way today so clearly something I'm doing is working!
But when Emberly was born we turned that office/sewing space into a nursery. All my fabric went into locker sized crates and lived in our hall closet. This shelf got a makeover here and became our "command center". We desperately needed a place to corral our stuff in our old house. I had to dig through a closet to find what I needed each time and I had to work off our dining room table which was a total pain. SO I just kinda stopped sewing for a while.

After we moved and stuff sat in storage I got the itch to get back to it. Then when we moved into a house with plenty of space to sew it was just perfect. Currently Josh and I share the finished basement. He gets half for gaming. I get half for sewing.

Wrapping the fabric around comic book boards was tedious in the beginning but it is such a great system and has held up well.  After getting back into sewing and appliqueing and getting some orders done I was totally frustrated that nothing was organized.
I mean it doesn't look TERRIBLE but there was no rhyme or reason to how things were thrown back in.

So out it all came. And I piled it into categories that I use.
Everything is pretty self explanatory, but the "other" pile was just colorful prints that didn't have a perfect category- so I organized those in ROYGBIV order.
I wish I had an incredible before and after but I don't. On the left is ginghams, solids, plaids, stripes, and chevrons. On the right is polkas and all the colors Red-Purple (and then neutrals on the end: grays, browns, blacks).

I also had accumulated alot of fabric that needed to be wrapped on the boards and then some that had been so used that it no longer fit on the board and needed to be moved to the scrap pile. Also I haven't bought any more comic book boards from that first order. I now use cut up cereal boxes which do practically the same thing. No way could I have started with cereal boxes unless we ate a TON of cereal, but it's nice when I need one or two.

Oh how nice it is to be able to see everything. This works out particularly well because when I'm working I typically think "I need a polka dot fabric here"- not necessarily a specific color. I find myself using the categories more than color which is why I didn't organize it all by color.
I still keep my solid and other scraps in these clear containers. Again, I usually go for the "type" not the color.

I'll share my new space someday. There are no windows down here so it's super hard to get good pictures, but one day when it's all clean I'll get them and post. Until then... happy sewing!

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