Out of hand

Last summer I had finally amassed enough fabric that I couldn't keep stuffing it under my sewing table and hoping J! wouldn't notice. So I decided to get organized and I spent the entire weekend neatly folding all my fabric. Then I came up with a genius idea--I would place each piece of fabric and its scraps in a nice ziploc bag! That way I could keep everything together; when I wanted to use a particular kind of fabric I wouldn't have to go digging around to find the larger scraps.

It really was a brilliant idea, but unfortunately I wasn't just dumping the ziploc bags into bins. Had this been the case, my trip to Costco to purchase 117 ziploc bags would have been vindicated. Instead of bins, I decided to store my fabric in some hanging shelves in the closet--we had the shelves, the closet space and no bins, so it really wasn't much of a choice. Anyway, end result: ziploc bags sliding all over the place (usually onto the floor). Disaster.

Having spent a good amount of time organizing all the bags, though, I wasn't crazy about doing it all over again the next weekend, so I decided to live with it. Really, this just meant a lot of shoving and increasing frustration on my part, while the ziploc bags slowly got their revenge through passive resistance and slipperiness. Last weekend, though, I couldn't hide from my horrible organization anymore. Plus, I was tired of getting attacked by an avalanche of plastic everytime I opened the closet doors.

Ugh.

Two hours later, all the bags are gone, all my fabric is neatly folded and organized by shelf, and all the scraps are now in a wicker hamper we weren't using anyway. Should have done this months ago. Plus, as a bonus, I found three pieces of nice fabric I'd forgotten about. Sweet!

Ahhh. So much better.