Does this ever happen to you: after buying a wonderful piece of fabric at your LQS, you bring it home only to find out that you already have it in your stash?
As you can see, this very lovely Wildwood for Free Spirit/Westminster print caught my eye not once, but twice. Guess I must really like it!
Keeping a book of fabric swatches in your purse like the 3×5 card notebook pictured here (which I haven’t updated since 2003) can help you keep track of your fabric stash when you’re out shopping.
Just cut a little piece of fabric from the corner and stick it down with a glue stick. You can write any pertinent info next to the swatch such as manufacturer, date of purchase, the store, how much you bought, what you need to go with it, etc. You can also arrange them any way you wish: color, style, designer, project, and so on. This is my 30s repro swatch book.
If you’re a pre-washer, then washing and ironing your new fabric right away is one way to burn it into your memory (just don’t burn the fabric itself). Using the fabric in a quilt is another good way to help your purchases stick in your head. Alternately you could just spend a whole lot of time admiring the new fabric, but unfortunately you’re not going to make very many quilts that way.
My problem is more often that know I have a fabric but simply can’t find it in my stash. Does that mean I need to clean and organize???
Anyone tried using smart phone to make a scrap-photo of your fabrics? You could then organize by color or other criteria. Keep photos on your phone and view when at the fabric store. Annotate if necessary.
Joyce: If that means you need to clean and organize then so do I! Actually I’m almost finished with my studio reorganization. I’ll post pics when I’m finished.
Susan: That’s a great idea! Good enough to make me want to finally figure out how to use the camera on my phone.
“(which I haven’t updated since 2003)”
See, that would be my problem! I don’t even always remember to take a picture of a finished quilt, let alone cut swatches of all my thousands of fabrics!
I do have some duplicates, but if I buy it twice (or three times), I figure I must *really* love it!
Kelly Smith
I’m a visual organizer! I keep fabrics in clear bins, organized by colors.