Organising the Fabric in my Sewing Room

I have a huge problem. Actually, it’s not huge. It’s a medium size room. I have a medium size room problem.

Our stuff has got out of hand in our sewing and hobby room.

You see, I’m not very good at putting stuff away once I’ve finished with it. And since it’s the middle floor of our house, it acts as a kind of dumping ground for stuff that doesn’t really have anywhere else to go.

Urgh. It’s just awful. And because it’s not a space I want to work in, I took my sewing machine downstairs to the lounge to work on stuff. So I’ve been cluttering up our dining table with my sewing, and to be honest my partner was starting to get a bit fed up with me taking over the lounge as well.

So I folded all my fabric up and filed it into baskets. Well, not all the fabric, just the quilting fabric that I have here (I have a boatload at my Dad’s that I might go and collect on Friday…). I used this tutorial here, you might find it helpful too.

The baskets were from Wilkos and barely cost anything at all.

And then I got to work on sorting out my scraps that are left over from making quilts, costumes and testing out embroidery and stuff.

Yup, they’re a whole load of 2.5″ squares. I was going to just put them to one side to amass more, but I couldn’t wait to get started on putting some blocks together. I’d not have put those particular colours together before, but actually they looked really good.

It’s going to be an Irish Chain quilt when I’ve finished. I just need to cut a load more bigger white squares.

The hexie quilt got a couple more scraps added too – so I’ve got 70 hexies in total now. Just about another thousand to go!

Believe me when I say it’s tidier. It really is. Even the small amount I did has made a huge difference to how I can move around the room. Much better.

Plus I made an extra special effort to make the fireplace look cute.

Now I actually *want* to stand there and do the ironing.

The tidying push has mostly come about because of two books I’m currently reading.

This one is Spark Joy, a book by Marie Kondo.* It’s a pretty hardcore approach to tidying and I’m not sure if I’m ready to go all out. I’m doing a gentle first sweep of the house before I commit to too much decluttering.

But you know, I’m still throwing out a carrier bag of stuff every day roughly – and it’s just rubbish. Like, literally rubbish. Stuff I just shouldn’t have in my house – shop recipts, broken pegs, out of date painkillers. STUFF!

The second one I’ve been reading is called The Shopkeeper’s Home.* It’s a great big coffee table book full of gorgeous pictures of incredibly well styled shops, and the homes of the people that created those shops. I certainly see a tour of the UK shops featured in my future.

Why am I reading books about shops? You’ll have to find out later I guess. It’s a bit of a project. We’ll see if it gets off the ground.