Catching up: Organization

I had some time off from work between Christmas and New Years, so I decided to re-organize my sewing area. I have boxes of fabric scraps that I could use if I knew what I had, so I decided to use baskets of fabric sorted by color to make them more accessible. I also put some metal shelves together so that I had a place to store the baskets. Here is the result:


I can make several quilts from the different fabrics, now that I have inventoried them! I'm going to make a nickel quilt from all of my brown fabrics, with a yellow or golden background and maybe a bit of orange or green thrown in for contrast.

I also found a project that I started several years ago, with blue, yellow and pink floral fabrics. I think maybe I'll work on that some more - the blocks are pretty easy. I think I will use the blue fabric for sashing between blocks, with the pink floral for the posts, and then add borders out of the blue and the yellow, if I have enough fabric.

I also have lots of large pieces of neutrals that I can use as backgrounds for other projects. All in all it was a very useful exercise, and in addition to organizing the fabrics, I cleared out some space in the furnace room as well.

The next put-together project was a bookcase that I bought at Target. This was a really nifty project and so easy to put together - instead of them giving me a bag full of all the hardware necessary for the whole bookcase, they had organized it into a bubble pack. Each bubble had only the hardware for the step. What a happy idea!

Here's a shot of the bubble pack:


I put the finished bookcase in my sewing area so that I can store my current projects, sets of coordinated fabrics for my next project, and my thread and tools.


I have decided that my goal this year will be to finish some projects that have been hanging around for a while. I plan to discipline myself and not buy any new fabric until I have Dan's bear-claw quilt, the Mariner's Star wall hanging, the blue/yellow/pink floral, the Christmas quilt for an unnamed recipient (it's a gift so I don't want to spoil the surprise), and the sunflowers quilt done. Well, at least I did until I saw this: Shade Cascade Medley Hmm, I could use those fabrics to make a kaleidoscope quilt....

So many fabrics, so little time!