Back to the Drawing Board

Well, so much for best-laid plans, by mice or anybody.  I got the two bookshelves put together, and all of the new furniture in place.  I brought out my totes full of fabric, and began to put it in the dresser... and by the time I'd emptied one of three large totes, I had filled the dresser and was just spinning in a circle trying to think of where I'd put more fabric.  So as it happens, I won't be using the dresser for fabric and the shelves for yarn and fiber, and now I've developed a Plan B.

First, I'm going through the collection to look for stuff I won't ever use, and putting those fabrics in a box.  I think this will reduce my collection by about thirty percent, perhaps more.

Some of the stash is actually projects, or parts of them.  One is a length of fabric with a star quilt design on it that could be made up into a bed cover.  But then, just now, it occurs to me that I have two actual Lakota-made star quilts, and one is on my bed.  What do I want a printed one for?  I'll be putting it in the to-go box tomorrow.  Gosh, I've been hauling that fabric around with me for something like twenty years.  Time.To.Let.Go.

One of the suggestions for organizing and storing fabric that I found on Pinterest was to get pre-cut cardboard pieces meant for collectible comic book storage.  You wrap your fabrics around these pieces and pin them, and then you can stack them or stow them on their sides (like books) on a shelf.  I don't want to be spending money on this, so I may follow the suggestion by another Pinner to go to a liquor store and see if they have any bottle separators to get rid of -- those are the inserts that go in cases of wine to keep the bottles from knocking into each other.  You cut the separators apart into sections and use those to wrap your fabric around.

Another great Pin idea is to use clothes pins to corral ribbon, and I can see that being a really useful tip for elastic and lace as well..

I covered a shoe box with some contact paper and filled it with small fabric scrap bits.  That worked.  I've also got a handful of new still-empty photograph file boxes ready to go.  I finally found a use for some of those old audio cassette "crates" that I've had since the stone age -- they're the perfect size for filing Altoid Tins, of which I have a million.  You can store the tins on their sides and use a label maker to put the contents on the end that faces up, and line them up in a crate.

So it hasn't all been a bust, but the fabric conundrum sort of stopped me in my tracks for a day there.  I'll try the liquor store tomorrow and see where that leads.