the great wall of fabric

Dear blog readers feast your eyes on this:

I'm pretty confident that this is my entire stash and I don't have any other bags stored at my parents house or on under a bed somewhere. So a few obversations:

1. I have a lot of fabric, but I sew regularly and it makes me happy so I'm not buying into the whole guilt trip thing.

2. I have lots of great fabric and fondling the fabric whilst folding it has given me so many ideas that I have about a millenium worth of projects lined up in my head.

3. I have heaps of grey fabric, which is ok because I make a lot of grey clothes. But weirdly I also have lots of orange and brown fabrics which I rarely wear.

4. I have a real hoarding tendency - I was going to get rid of some fabrics that I know I'll never use, but since I had enough space I couldn't bring myself to do it!

5. There is still some space there on the shelves, so I can't say I will completely stop buying more, but I will try to shop the stash first.

It has taken me the best part of two weeks to get my stash into this beautifully neat and ordered vision, not only because of the amount of fabric, or the fact that I had to do another trip to Ikea to get another shelf unit but also because I had to deal with constant interruptions from these two:

Anna would only play in her portable cot for a while before getting cranky, so I propped her up in the washing basket with some lovely soft microfleece and she seemed a bit happier for a little bit longer (it's not child abuse, she's doing some early bonding with fabric!). She still needs to be held most of the time and be given lots of attention though, so my window of getting things done with two hands is still limited. One of the mums in my mother's group is thinking about going back to work because she is bored: she sits around waiting for her daughter to wake up from her 2 hour naps three times a day. I am so jealous to say the least, but I have too many ideas in my head to ever be bored.

Thanks everyone for your feedback on the finer details of cloth nappies. I love having such an interactive blog getting advice on all these things because none of my real life friends cloth nappy or sew. Anyway I managed to salvage some of the bamboo fleece that I stupidly made into nappy liners and made some absorbent soakers four layers thick. This, combined with another soaker pad of four microfibre layers seems to give a really good amount of absorbency without too much bulk. In fact last night Anna slept through from 8pm to 5am (yay for small miracles) and her nappy lasted that entire time without any leakage.

Well I have so much more tidying up to in the sewing room before I can get any sewing done - that photo above doesn't show the great mountain of stuff that is in the rest of the room.....