Sewing Room Organization

Hi Creative People,

There are many areas of my sewing room that need my "organizational attention"...is that even a fair statement? Anyway, these areas are in desperate need of some sort of order!! From time to time when I come up with a way to combat my "chaos", I thought I would share.

I have been using this system for over a year and I love it!! This is my fabric swatches binder, I keep a small sample of all the fabric I have on hand so if I ever need to take it to the fabric store with me...I don't have to rustle through my fabric stash, I can just grab my binder and go.


For this project, I used a 1" view binder from Avery, I also used the removable tabs from Avery at the top of the pages considering I don't like when the tabs stick out from the side of the binder (I believe the protective sleeves are too wide for the binder):

I divide each section by color. I figured I would combine solid & print fabrics together. The dominant color in print fabric is how I decide what category to add it to.

                               

I also used baseball card holders and index cards to staple the sample fabric.

Here is a closer look at the sample fabric. I wrote down the fiber content and how many yards of fabric I have available and stapled it to the index card. On the back of the card, I wrote down the width of the fabric as reference if I wanted to make a project out of it.

I suppose I could save the baseball card holders and use the back for additional fabric, but I don't have a need to do that, besides I did not want to block any additional information that I have written on the back.

I have housed extra baseball card holders in the back of my binder, at this point I have room to grow to add more fabric swatches.

This is the binder part of my binder where I just used my label maker...it sits on my bookshelf for easy access.

Although, it is quite time consuming to complete this project, especially if you have a large stash of fabric, I think this is a great way to keep track of the fabrics I have and it gives me an "at-a-glance" look at what I have on hand. When I get new fabric, I just cut a swatch and add to my color category.

If you have any suggestions and/or you want to know all the materials I used, please feel free to send me an email.

Happy Sewing!