Keeping a Stash

After seeing my birds play with my stash book, Ginger of Scene in the Past wanted to know more. I did mention it back in January when I first made it, but it's never gotten it's own post so here it is:


Ok, so it's not so exciting to look at but it's really helpful. It all started when my dad wanted my help designing a fabric stash keeping iPhone app (because he's a nerdy programer like that) last Christmas. It's still a work in progress but it got me thinking about stash organization and then I remembered these great stash organizing sheets from Mena over at Sew Weekly.


So I organized my stash!


Each fabric gets a swatch and blanks for selvage width, yardage, type, cost, aquired, era and other notes. 


For a lot of my older stash, I don't have all of this info, but that's ok. I just filled in what I had. I bring it with me to the fabric store so I can just write all of this down off of the bolt. Some other info that I sometimes include are washing instructions and whether or not it's been prewashed.


Once a fabric is used up, I check the little "no longer in stash" box.


And because I'm a nerd and I like Excel, I added all of this info into a spread sheet so I can crunch numbers and make pie charts.

One day, I want to do something like this for patterns so I know how much yardage I need for a pattern while I'm out shopping but I can't draw and I haven't figured out how to get an illustration so no luck there yet. Maybe I'll have to get my dad working on an iPhone app for that!