I’ve been having a bit of a sort out in my sewing room over the last few days, trying to take stock of just how much fabric I have, or rather admit to myself just how big my hoard is!! I got inspired by a blog by Amy Smart on her Diary of a Quilter, it was about sorting and organising scraps. My scrap bag was an overflowing Ikea bag, was invariably ended up all over the floor before I managed to find the scrap I wanted! I needed to get organised!!

I purloined a spare set of drawers and rearranged the landing to accommodate them. My sewing room is ‘small but perfectly formed’, made smaller by the fact that it’s under the eaves, so headroom is limited!…so I overflow onto the landing where I’ve already got a beautiful pine chest full of fabric. I love this pine chest, you see it used to be my grandfather’s workbench, painted dark green, with a lathe and vice screwed to the top. My mum had it restored, it’s gorgeous, you can still see where his tools went. It’s now full of fabric!

I sorted out my scrap bag into colours and I’ve got one drawer for each colour group. I even went through my fat quarter drawer for those pieces which are realistically nowhere near a fat quarter any more, into the scrap drawers they went!

I then turned my attentions to my dressmaking collection! I rearranged it into jacket, skirt and shirt lengths, although some do overlap. I noticed some quilting blogs have a tally of how much fabric they have used against the amount purchased. I thought this could be quite a useful exercise. I couldn’t face counting the yards so I just counted lengths of fabric…

OK if I write this quickly it might not seem quite so much…

8 jacket lengths

18 skirt lengths

10 shirt lengths

21 pieces of furnishing weight

134 fat quarters

18 longer lengths of quilting fabric

There, it’s out!! Hope my OH doesn’t read this particular blog!! So, my aim this year is to reduce the size of my stash, that’s not saying I won’t buy any more fabric (that would be unrealistic!!) but I want to sew more than I buy! I should have a pretty good wardrobe by the end of the year too!