You own HOW much fabric?!?
Don’t tell my husband, but I own about 1000 pieces of fabric. (Maybe you do, too.) Of course, it doesn’t do me any good to own them if I can’t find them and see them. Plus, I need to be able to easily pull them out and them put them away again. Therefore, I store them in drawers, standing up vertically.
Thankfully, I work, primarily with “fat quarters,” fabric pieces that are about 18″ x 22″. Here’s a photo of the storage container for those. (Click any photo for a larger view.)
Each drawer holds one or two colors, arranged by value (light and dark.)
The fabrics are folded to size and they stand up like file folders.
I can select fabric with the drawers still in place, or I can remove an
entire drawer for a better look.
Each drawer includes a container for scraps. Once a fabric is too small to show
up among its neighbors it is designated as a scrap. When it gets smaller than
my fist it becomes trash. (Well, not exactly. Some of my friends collect
tiny pieces like that, so I pack up little gift baggies for them.)
Larger pieces (and I don’t have many) are stored in a file-size drawer. Rolling these fabrics gives them enough body to stand up so I can get a good look at ’em.
How do you store your fabrics? Brave enough to admit how many you have? (Or maybe I should ask if you’re brave enough to count them?)
Ellen Lindner
I also store my fabric like file! I have 12-12 gallon plastic bins full! For FQ and smaller cuts, I store them in a small basket which sits down inside the big bins, stacked. For tiny pieces, I keep them in zip lock bags in color families.
Yowsa! That’s A LOT of fabric!!!
I’m not brave enough to count them. I once had to put a value on my stash so I measured how many yards filled a standard moving box. After that every full box contained that many yards for the inventory. The very conservative value was staggering and that was 13 years ago.
I only have a small amount of quilters cotton so far and it is only just starting to overflow a sewing box. I have them all standing up so once I take out the larger pieces from the top I can see all my fat quarters.
I also have two underbed storage boxes for other fabrics and I have a box full of fur and wool from re-enactment costuming.
She who dies with the most fabric wins remember!… though these days I try to only buy what I will immediately use.