More stash loving

from Pinterest of course!

I am so pleased that (most of) you love your stashes, big or small, and I happily accept your admiration for mine! Although I'm sorry Lesley S for destroying that nice image in your head of my neat fabric stash, hopefully I can get back to that state soon.

Actually all of your comments have given me a new perspective, I no longer think of my fabrics as a stash or a hoard but rather as a collection and essential tools of my trade.  As Stephanie said, it's not like we can sew without fabrics.  And now that I've been clearing out the less lovely pieces it's become a carefully curated collection, only containing those pieces I love (clearly I have a large capacity for love ha haha).  But unlike the stamp collector who'll never post a letter with them, or the wine collector who'll never drink a bottle or even the vintage toy collector that will never play with the toys I do actually plan to one day, piece by piece, use as much of my collection as I can.

And the final word on the collection goes to Paola (who has recently started her very own sewing blog La Sartora), who so wisely said that it's better to spend your money on the things that make you happy.

Jane at BallesBazaar - we're planning to sell our house in spring this year (6 short months eek!) so that we can build a new house for my husband's parents to live with us.  They are both getting quite elderly and need more care than we can give them since they live so far away.  Plus my husband is the first born son of Chinese parents, so it's sort of expected.  I really like my inlaws so I don't mind the planned living arrangement, and I've already told my husband that a large sewing studio for me is non negotiable, so whilst I'll be temporarily packing up the stash while we build it will be totally worth it in the long term.

As to the cataloguing of my collection I'm afraid I have no impressive tip to share.  I'm going the very low tech route of using an excel spreadsheet with photos inserted into the row, listing the width, length, fabric type and cost/place of purchase if I can remember it.  I did think about using the FabricStashXL app to record it all, but I have read mixed reviews about it's functionality on the iPad so for now I'm sticking with good old excel, especially since over the years I have kept a few scattered records in excel that I'm going to amalgamate.  Plus with excel I could in theory, if I wanted to, calculate exactly how much fabric I have (do I want to know exactly though?).

Far - the fabrics on the bolts are mostly bought from The Remnant Warehouse, a fabric shop here in Sydney that sells fabric by the roll for quite reasonable prices, especially on their two for one Tuesdays.  I also ask at the fabric stores for any empty tubes they don't want so I can use them for storage of slippery fabrics or really long lengths of fabrics, and I've quite often found bolts of fabrics from opshops too.

I'm in the midst of sewing a dress from the fabric I bought at the first Sydney social sewists meet up last year but had to pause while I searched for and and then prewashed some grey lining material.  Perfect timing to clean up the grey shelf, which looked like this before:

And now looks like this:

Hmmm, you all know how much I love my grey fabrics so there's no surprise that this shelf is still pretty full after a clean out.  But at least it's neat and tidy once more.