A New Project & SBQ

My new project is.... well, I can't tell you, because it's for an exchange. ;) I felt like I needed a little break from PIG last night, so I decided to start my fall exchange gift. I love fall designs and colors, so it was tough for me to settle on a pattern for this one. One pattern really stood out from the others though, so I pulled the floss (overdyes... yay!!!) and set about finding a piece of suitable fabric. I found the most perfect fabric in my stash for this little project. It's an R&R hand-dyed thing in a shade that really sets off the floss colors. I only have one small piece of this fabric, which makes it hard to give up, but nothing else even came close to looking as pretty as this one. I have a feeling that I am going to be tracking down more of this fabric and stitching another of these things for myself. LOL Anyway, I think my partner will like it, and it's a really fun stitch.

And now, it's time for this weeks SBQ. We actually have two this week:

Ami asks us:

Do you have an organizational system for your fabric? If so, what is it? If not, what do you store your fabric in?

And Anna wants to know:

How do people store their fabric, especially those small but potentially usable pieces? Do they sort by count? How do they label it or otherwise know what each piece is?

Timely questions, since I was just searching through my fabric stash last night. Fabric storage was a complete non-issue until I got acquainted with Silkweaver and their Fabric of the Month club. Before that time, I purchased only fabric that I needed for a specific project. I had no idea why anyone would want to stockpile fabric. Well, let's just say that I learned... all too well. Soon after I joined FOTM, I purchased a large Rubbermaid box to store all the fabrics in. It was so big, and my collection was so small, that I thought it would be all the fabric storage I would ever need. It still fits in there... sort of... but, if I get many more packages from Silkweaver, it's going to be time for new storage.

I have a well-intended, but poorly implemented, system for sorting my fabrics. I'm not a fan of cutting a small hunk out of a large piece of fabric when I want to stitch a small project, so I first separate my fabric by the size of the cut. Much of my fabric collection is made up of small cuts, so those take most of the storage space. From there, I sort by fabric count, then by color. At least, that is what I intend to do. The reality is that I'm not that organized most of the time, and I'm lucky if all of the fabric makes it into the container designated for fabric storage. Even so, it's still relatively organized and I am usually able to find what I'm looking for.