Someone asked a question in a comment this week about organization. This sent me back in time to review my posts on organization, as it is always easier to point someone to a previous blog post than to write the whole thing over and over. Not that you aren’t worth it, of course. 😉
I am not sure I ever said, but I store most of my fabric, primarily, by color in plastic bins. Occasionally, I will put a special group of fabric together. For example, I have some silk fabrics in one bin (bottom right). I can’t buy those bins anymore, which is too bad, because I like the flat tops, but in an ideal world I would have some other system where the fabric wasn’t confined like it is in the bins. I am grateful to have the bins, but if I need light blues, there is a lot of manhandling that has to happen before I can get that bin out.
Some fabrics have spilled over to other parts of the closet, so I can’t just look in the orange bin if I want orange fabrics. I also have a drawer system, holds a lot of my dots. Not all, but a lot.
TFQ helped me pick out this as well. I like it and it holds a lot.
One issue I have is non-fabrics and non-patterns. I have pre-cuts waiting for me to make my intended project. I have blocks from the City Sampler project. I also have blocks from the quilt class with Frances. These are still a problem I haven’t resolved. I put them where I can find some space. This isn’t an ideal solution. The pictures in this post from 2008 make me sentimental for the good old days when this closet was clean. At least, I am continually removing fabric I no longer want to use for my own projects and making it into donation quilts or giving it to the guild. I am also paying more attention to fabric I buy so I don’t buy things that will end up in a donation quilt sometime.
One of the posts I wrote talked about organizing projects in project boxes. I have a couple of project boxes like the ones pictured and I don’t use them for projects. I want to use them for projects, but they take up more space than file folders. In my current space, with the current furniture, etc, it isn’t possible. The ones I have I use for patterns, especially bag patterns. And they are full, which means that I have to start churning out bags. HA! We’ll see since I have two bags on my to do list and all of those patterns are bags on my ‘someday’ list.
As I mentioned in another previous post, I still use the hunting and gathering method to make quilts. At the moment I am hunting and gathering for at least the following someday quilts:
- FOTY 2015
- SpinWheel
- Blue Lemonade
- Windmill
- Pink gradated quilt
- Blue gradated quilt
- 30 Something quilt
There are other patches as well such as 2.5″ squares (you just never know when you will need some), donation patches, random HSTs and others.
I still use the scone boxes for hunting and gathering, though that trickle of new boxes has slowed. The company changed the cranberry orange scone recipe 🙁 and they just aren’t as good as they used to be. Not bad, but not worth the 360 calorie commitment. The scone boxes are a good size, but they have some issues. The rounded edges don’t poke me, which is not. They also don’t stack very well because of those rounded edges. Also, being disposable, the plastic is pretty thin and tends to break easily. Still since they come into the house filled with something rather than empty, they are economical.
Of course, I probably shouldn’t stack them 8-10 high. Fortunately they don’t open and spew fabric patches everywhere when they do fall. One thing to think about would be not to have so much hunting and gathering going on all at once.
I have a few miscellaneous plastic, former food containers as well. Good ones, for me, come from chocolate covered cherries and spinach.
At some point, I plan to replace these with more stackable and sturdier boxes.
There is a lot of other stuff to organize in my workroom, but it is all badly stored if adequately organized and I don’t want to show you photos. I really want better shelves or something for my books, embellishments, etc. I think I will be able to work better and get more day.
Off to buy a lottery ticket!