Fabric

That’s it. I’ve had it. I really need to find a way to organize my fabric, because seriously, one shouldn’t have to pull everything out of an overstuffed closet to locate a specific print.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had fabric in my closet. I remember as a five year old taking scraps from whatever project my mother had been working on and finding some way to use them. Growing up poor will do this to a person, I think. It is very difficult to throw anything away, even scraps that for all intents and purposes, will have no second, third or fourth life, depending on where they are in the cycle. So these scraps ended up in a bag in my closet, and every now and then, I would try to incorporate them into a project. Just for reference, the oldest scrap fabrics I have in my closet now are about twenty years old, as I remember getting them in the seventh grade at the old Ben Franklin Crafts store, and a couple from Fabricland.

However, lately, especially since my sewing machine is mostly fixed (the bobbin winder is a little testy, but that is apparently normal for this particular model, and the cheapest winder that will work for these bobbins cost more than most new sewing machines, so I’ve decided I can live with it) I’ve been trying to work on a lot of those projects that have been getting put off. But I am stuck with the dilemma of having a chaotic looking craft room after pulling out half of the fabric in the closet to get to the ones I want to use, or keep stuffing everything back into the closet and hope that I remembered to put the fabrics I intend to use on the top. Option three is to sew like crazy and make the fabric piles disappear, but the likelihood of that happening are so slim, I can’t really count that as a valid alternative.

I decided to kind of organize it all into groups. The fleece is all together, and the upholstery fabrics are mostly together, except for the two bolts I have off to the side. It really is the quilting fabric that I can’t keep in order, probably because it is the smallest as far as size goes since it is all so thin, but has the most variety, and the only order is that it is all separated by projects that have almost all already been done. I’ve got it all in various bags, totes and luggage, but they are all in various areas of the closet and some I haven’t seen in years.

Part of me wants to go to IKEA and get an EXPEDIT Bookcase to put all the fabric on so that it is easier to see what I have and find, maybe even get a few storage boxes for the small stuff, like trim and yes, one for scraps. But the other part of me doesn’t necessarily want to look at it all the time. And while it won’t be that difficult to just get storage boxes like I have for all my scrapbooking stuff to store all the fabric in, I’m afraid that if I don’t see it, I won’t want to use it. Or maybe I should find a better solution to keeping all of my puppet building materials together so that there is room in the closet to organize the quilting fabric into one section and the upholstery fabric into another. So many decisions to make and so many choices to select and so little time I think I am willing to invest. Shall I put it off for another day, or will I get ambitious and just do something about it? The world may never know… unless I blog about it.