Thursday, February 21, 2013

Fabric!

I don't have a stash. Not really. But I have been buying some fabric on spec recently. For the first year I was back to quilting, and a bit more, I bought scrap bags from the local quilt shop. I like a scrappy look. Their scrap bags frequently had a lot of a single fabric cut into useable sized strips, and occasionally pieces almost the size of a fat quarter. I've used a lot of that in projects. A couple of the fabrics in the bed scarf were from the scrap bags and all of the fabric in my table scarf were from there too.


Yesterday I got a box of fabrics from JoAnn's. I've never ordered mail order but everything I bought was on sale. And a couple of the fabrics I got were things I just had to have from the photos on the web site. I decided to try the mail order because I had a good idea what kind of thing I wanted for the hexagon project and I was pretty sure I could not find what I wanted locally.

I was pretty amazed at what came out of the box. Everything was of reasonable quality. That was something I was worried about. The black fabric was exactly what I wanted. I thought it would be, and it was. One of the two had to have fabrics was just wonderful. The other was OK, but not great.

Each fabric came in a separate plastic bag. Nicely folded. Every piece of fabric had at least some additional fabric. The smallest amount extra was about 1/8th of a yard. Two of the bags were marked that they had been the end of the bolt. I got 3/4 yard extra of the black fabric, 2/3 yard extra of one of the others and 1/2 yard extra on a third.

Would I order again. Yes. In fact last night I ordered for a specific project. In this case it is possible that when I get the fabrics I'll need to tweak from my new stash, but now I actually have a stash.
 

Now that I've got the yardage organized I need to organize the larger amounts of fabric that isn't at least a yard long. I've got some fat quarters and some half yards and some of the stuff from the scrap bags are the equivalent of half a yard to a yard. I need to put those where I can actually see them and not with the smaller pieces of fabric.

The box above doesn't look full in the photo, but by the time I located and folded all of the one yard or longer pieces of fabric on pendaflex folders, it was totally full.

Take care all.

8 comments:

  1. Congratulations on your new stash! I've never ordered online from Joann's so with your good experience, I might do that. I also buy online from Connecting Threads. They have very high quality fabric. I buy my batting from them regularly, especially because I like wool batting. I also use their clearance fabrics a lot to get 1/4-1/2 yd for strips.
    Just an idea, but I store my larger than 1/4 yd pieces of fabric in a chest of drawers. I had to buy mine because I have so much fabric, but not nearly as much as others!

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  2. Another possibility for small pieces might be a chest of drawers with very narrow drawers, such as one that could be used for sheet music.

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  3. I'm glad you had a good first online fabric buying experience. I have ordered from a lot of online shops and have been quite happy, overall. Your stash looks so organized!

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  4. You are so smart to start organizing your stash right away! I buy 90% of my quilting supplies online as my LQS doesn't have a very broad selection of fabrics and never has sales. And they aren't really that welcoming so I'll pick up things I need on short notice there (would like them to stay in business) but don't feel bad when I do the bulk of my buying elsewhere!

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  5. Great idea to organize your fabrics on the hanging folders. I never thought of that, nor have I see it before. Your fabrics all look yummyyyyy!

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  6. I'm glad to hear about your good experience on-line with Joann's - I may try that the next time I need fabric for the stash. The brick-and-mortar Joann's here is very chintzy on their cuts - sometimes by the time you square up the fabric, you've got significantly less than you asked and paid for! So I may start buying on-line for my "staples"!!

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  7. I just found your blog today, I'm glad that I did. I *love* your method for organizing fabric in the file folder box. I fold mine and stack them on a shelf but when I pull one out, they all topple over. I'm going to try your method!

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