Falling Phoenix Studio

“ When the night has come And the land is dark And the moon is the only light we’ll see No I won’t be afraid Oh, I won’t be afraid Just as long as you stand, stand by me ”

If you are like most crafters, the longer you have a sewing-related hobby the larger your stash of fabric will get.  (If you sew and you don’t have a fabric stash, I am officially afraid of you and your merciless resolve.)  I’ve been cosplaying for about eight years and sewing for longer than that, so the amount of fabric I want to hold onto because I might use it someday is… really extreme.

What I ended up having to do to get my fabric stash under control was catalog it, put it into bins, and get it out of my actual craft room.  I need to pull something from my stash maybe a couple times a month at most.  It doesn’t make a lot of sense to keep that stuff in my primary working area when it gets used that infrequently, so I keep it my basement. You might not have a basement you can store stuff in, but everyone’s got corners of closets or other less readily accessible areas where stuff for long-term storage is asking to go.  A catalog of what you have allows you to utilize those spaces more effectively. 

This is the binder I made up, which 1) allows me to check what’s in the basement without having to actually go to the basement, and 2) is way easier to flip through than a pile of fabric that I have to re-fold because I messed it up while pawing through it.  

If you’d like to use my templates, they’re over here!  My goal in making them was to not overwhelm myself with information because I had a ton of fabrics to catalog and I didn’t want it to take forever.  The sheets are made to record a few pieces of information:

A fabric swatch. I made two template sheets, one with the swatch space on the left and one with the swatch space on the right, so the stacked pages wouldn’t be super uneven.

A brief description and enough room to note anything special about the fabric.

A super rough ballpark of how much yardage I have.

Did I ever cut anything out of this fabric before, or is it still basically in a rectangle?  Helpful for knowing if your fabric looks like swiss cheese or not.

And that’s it.  You can add more or less information based on what you think is important, but that’s enough for me to go off of.  And here’s the organized stash itself, more or less:

Another tip in organizing your storage bins: if you make it so all the edges of your fabrics are visible when you take the top off your bin, it’ll be easier to find things and take them out.  While I was loading the bins, I set them on one side and stacked my fabric up in a pile.  (The end result is the same thing as Konmari vertical clothes folding!)