Stash Organising!

Once a upon a time, not that long ago, we lived in a small, Welsh, terraced house. The only storage we had was our wardrobe, the airing cupboard and kitchen cupboards. Quite frankly the kitchen cupboards were not suitable for storing sewing items and full of cookware or food. At that time the kids were all under 6 years so the airing cupboard was permanently full of drying clothes since we didn't own a tumble dryer and it was quite often too wet to hang it outside! This left our wardrobe which had to accommodate clothes and any remaining stuff that needed a home. 

This meant my sewing fabric was confined to three of these fat quarter bags! Not a pretty sight (especially given poor night time lighting!).

We now live in a large Canadian home where storage is not a problem and I have part of the basement for my sewing 'room'! No more setting up my sewing machine on the kitchen table any time I wanted to sew and making sure it was all packed away by the time the kids got up! Needless to say a lot more hand sewing happened back then.

Any purchases since arriving in our new location got prime place on an old Ikea CD shelving unit (ideal sized shelves for fat quarters!). But the fabrics that came with me from the UK have been sat in these bags getting messier and messier. So I decided to do something about it.

I used a tutorial from the Sunday Morning Quilts book by Cheryl Arkison and Amanda Jean Nyberg to make some fabric boxes to store these fabrics so I can access the fabrics easier! 

I am also quite bad at discarding fabrics, even very tiny bits! I have several mandarin boxes full of tiny scraps in all colours! So, I used a lot of these little scraps to construct the side panels for the boxes and some larger pieces of those fabrics I was not so keen on anymore for the linings. Rather time consuming but very satisfying!

I now have four colours finished and have maybe another 3 or 4 to go! But I have to stop for now as we have run out of cereal box cardboard to line the box to make it sturdy! The kids usually claim any kind of cardboard they can, for making things like robots or fairy houses! I have swiped a box from their stash but if I take too much it will be noticed, so my alternative is to tell them to eat more cereals! :)



Whilst it feels productive, it has rather put a halt to anything else I should have been doing, like quilting the Mario quilt!! Ah well, still got 25 days to get that one done! 

Linking up with others at Freshly pieced and The Needle and Thread Network.