Creative Spaces Blog Hop: Week 4 Fabric Organization
Good morning Hoppers!! This week feels near to my heart. I think many of us get into quilting, sewing, and designing because we fall in love with fabric. We love going to fabric stores! We love bringing home bags of beautiful woven gems to pet and play with.
Once we get that fabulous fabric home, we need a way to store it that allows us to see what we have available and a way to deal with our leftovers that makes sense.
Today I'd like to start by sharing how I handle my fabric when I first buy it and bring it home. I buy a lot of fabric that I don't have a plan for. I just know that I need colors and I need a range of value change in each color family. When I travel to different parts of the country, I buy the fabrics that stand out and fit the gaps in my current stash. If I don't have a plan for the purchase, I buy a half yard. A half yard of fabric is enough to use as a background, a binding, a variety of applique, and a lot of different piecing
projects, so it has a great deal of versatility.
The only time I buy more than a half yard is if I think it will be a great background for a
large project or I already have a plan for that particular fabric.
When I get it home, I fold all the fabric the way. Quilting fabric mostly comes off the bolt the same width, which makes it ideal to fold it based on that initial width. After the fabric is washed, I fold it selvage to selvage, just like it came off the bolt, and then fold that in half twice more. Finally, I fold that in half width wise.
This folding process makes all of my fabric the same size on the shelf. So when I stack it on the shelf with the other fabrics. On the shelf, all of my fabric gets shaded according to value (light to dark) so it's easy for me to know what I have at a glance and to plan what I need to buy next.
When I'm planning a trip to the quilt shop, I snap a few pictures with my phone so I see what I need to add to my stash. Right now I am low on pinks and medium bright blues.
Of course as soon as we start cutting up our fabric we have to deal with scraps. If I have less than 1/3 of a yard, it doesn't go back on the value shelves, it goes in the scrap drawers. My scrap drawers are organized in color families. I just finished doing a 6 week blog series called The Summer Scrap Elimination in which I mostly cleaned out my blue, green, and purple drawers, so those are looking mostly empty. Prior to the summer they looked a whole lot more like the red, orange, yellow drawers look right now. My daughter is in charge of sorting the scraps into the color drawers. Occasionally, something sneaks into the drawers where it doesn't belong! Clearly that red in the green drawer is some lazy sorting. I'll have to doc her time on the tablet this week!
I like to find/create great patterns that showcase scraps. We all have them and we all need to find uses for them. One of my
favorite things I made to show off scrappy
fabric choices was my Popped Color pattern. I love how many greens I was able to use in the background and how many small fabric ends I was able to make use of in the flowers.
I need four 3" squares of a fabric to pair with another fabric to make a flower. I start with a pile of scraps and make a ton of flower petals to have on hand for the next Popped Color sample.
When I have a whole basket of them, I know I'm ready to make new things!
This week I would love to offer 3 lucky winners a free copy of my Popped Color pattern to help them take a chunk out of their scrap collection.
Like my Facebook page and comment on the Week 4 Blog post to be entered in the prize drawing this week for your very own Popped Color pattern!
We all hope you're enjoying the Creative Spaces Blog Hop and finding some great ideas to help you with your own fabric creations. Be sure to visit all of the different creatives and see what amazing things they have for you! Stay tuned next week for blogs on Embellishments, buttons, and threads!
Mondays
(Be sure to visit Cherry's blog to find out how to enter the prize drawings!)
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