How to stash the STASH?

Hello everyone,

I've finally gotten around taking some photos of my stash because I am currently trying to figure out how best to sort my stash. And I have to say, in real life my stash looks fairly tidy and sorted but in these photos it is a disgrace, it looks so messy and I really need to get this sorted. Ideally, we should win the lottery so we can actually finally buy a house rather than renting this shoe box, but this is all we have at the moment and we have to live with it.

My fabric collection is not extensive, at least I feel there is s lot more fabric I NEED but my craft room is tiny, and there is no space left for anything else, so I need to sort my fabric properly to make the most of the space I have.

I always tend to buy whole collections of designer fabrics (if I have saved up for them) and then I store them all together. But I find that when I make quilts I tend to use one whole collection rather than picking fabrics based on color or patterns.

I am a huge fan of Elisabeth Hartmann's quilts and she seems to store fabrics by color and she also tends to use a lot more monochromatic fabrics or strong colors with white patterns, while my fabrics are usually multicolored and patterned.

So I am determined to change the way I use my fabrics.

My designer collections are stored in these drawer towers

Backyard Baby and Woodland Tails

Some extra Patty Young

The Echo drawer that is so stuffed I can't actually open it

Patty Young Andalucia original and 2012

More Patty Young (think it's obvious I am obsessed with her fabrics), Lush

Patty Young Sanctuary and Tina Givens

More Patty Young Flora & Fauna

Some Heather Ross, Sandi Henderson and Jowel Dewberry

Pat Bravo drawer

Laura Gunn drawer

Hope Valley and a gorgeous collection of .... something I have completely forgotten

Amy Butler (plus Phillip Jacobs)

Loulouthi and FMF

Central Park, some Riley Blake and other jelly rolls or layer cakes

Stripes and some solids layer cakes

Tufted Tweets and Far Far Away

Jessica Levitt's Timber

The Echino drawer plus Far Far Away 2

Lots of Kaffe Fassett

And I have lots of fabrics in 2 plastic boxes when I didn't get the whole (or majority of) collection. And when I last looked it turns out most of those are dots and circles of some kind. (Think a circles quilt is in order.)

So now I need to decide whether I should sort my fabric by color instead. Not sure how that would work when many of the fabrics are multicolored. And as you can see I only have one shelf for fabrics and the rest has to be stored in my drawers.

Jeni from In color order blogs about her stash and how to choose fabrics. Especially this post on stash storage is really helpful. And there are more blogs and flickr groups etc on fabric storage, I'll add some later or write a separate blog post about them.

So how do you store your stash? Do you sort by color or by collection?

Any suggestions welcome. I need your help ladies (and lads).

Love, Nadine