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Stash Management Basics

If you're like most quilters, you love fabric and probably have amassed a fairly extensive collection.  For us quilters, our fabric collections are the raw materials of our craft, and a powerful source of inspiration.  I couldn't begin to tell you how many yards are in my stash, or how many different fabrics, but I can assure you it's A LOT!  When I was packing up to move a few years ago, I was shocked to see how many boxes my stash filled.  Not wanting to hear my dear husband's reaction to all those cartons labeled "Quilt Fabric,"  I disguised my stash as packing material for the china and glassware.  Fabric?  What fabric?  I don't see any fabric here....

Once it all came out of the boxes, I needed a system for storing it.  But not just for storing it.  I needed to access it, and to be able to find exactly what I was looking for, fast.  Sorting by color was an obvious place to start, but it got complicated.  There were all those multi-colored prints, for one thing.  Also, different yardages fold to different sizes.

My solution (not a perfect one, but it works for me) is to start by folding everything into a more or less standard size.  Since I like a scrappy look in my quilts, I mostly buy 1 yard or half yard cuts, but often much larger pieces as well.  I fold them selvage to selvage, then again lengthwise fold to selvage.  The clever gals at Stashbusters introduced me to "ruler folding."  There are many variations on the technique, but I simply roll my folded yardage around my 24"x6" ruler to make a "mini bolt" about 10 inches long by 6 inches wide.  Several stacks of these can fit side by side in a drawer or on a shelf, and I stack them so I can see the edge of every piece.  Larger cuts can be rolled around the ruler the same way, but if the "mini bolt" gets too big, I'll store them separately.

Next I sort it all into several very broad color categories, each of which is assigned to a drawer.  My color groups are red (which includes pink), blue, green, and purple.   (I have a lot of purple, but no orange ... go figure.)  In my stash, yellow gets blended into what I call "neutrals," consisting of creams, tans, and browns.  As my taste evolves to a brighter look, I can foresee yellow coming into a category of its own.  Black & white make another group.  All solids go into a separate pile.  That leaves all those prints that are hard to designate as any particular single color.  My simple solution is a final category:  multi.  At one point I had a separate group for plaids, but I ran short on storage and shuffled them back into the color groups.

Within each color category, I don't do any further sorting by value or style or anything else for storage purposes.  I'm just not that particular.  Besides, with each quilt I design, I shuffle fabrics within the color groups according to shifting criteria, sometimes looking for only pale tints or fine-grained textures, for instance.

That leaves all the scraps, which is a topic for scrap obsession!