Stitching Bloggers’ Question of the Week: Fabric Organization?

I’ve been wait­ing eager­ly for this week’s SBQ. I don’t know why, I just have. They some­times remind me of stash I don’t think about often enough.

Do you have an orga­ni­za­tion­al sys­tem for your fab­ric? If so, what is it? If not, what do you store your fab­ric in?

How do peo­ple store their fab­ric, espe­cial­ly those small but poten­tial­ly usable pieces? Do they sort by count? How do they label it or oth­er­wise know what each piece is?

I nev­er real­ly thought about label­ing them. I’ll start doing that in the future. I’m usu­al­ly so excit­ed when I buy mate­r­i­al for a project, though, that I can’t resist start­ing on it right away. It’s only the much old­er stuff that needs labeling!

I can tell what most are just by look­ing at them. I’ve got a nifty lit­tle ruler for thread counts if I have any trou­ble deter­min­ing that visu­al­ly. Any­thing that isn’t a neu­tral col­or has been pur­chased for a spe­cif­ic project, so I know imme­di­ate­ly, for instance, “oh, that’s for the sec­ond set of the Amaryl­lis Art­works man­dalas” (yes, I love those so much I intend to stitch them again).

Almost all of my cloth is even­weave, but there’s some linen and even a lit­tle bit of Aida and Hardan­ger that dates back to my teen years when I start­ed stitch­ing. (I gave away most of that old stuff via Freecy­cle last year, then found more!)

All of it is stored in a set of plas­tic draw­ers with some cedar balls tossed in. We don’t have a prob­lem with moths, but I don’t want to take any chances and I do love the scent.

No pic­ture this time — things are all top­sy-turvy and I can’t get to my draw­ers to get a photo.

I could­n’t stand it. I had to do photos.