How BIG a stash do you really need?

Apr 27

Quilters are naturally drawn to fabric…we get seduced by the beautiful colors, the designs, the amazing feel of the fabrics. Shopping with intent is one thing (“I need x to finish making this quilt” or “I just need to find the perfect backing”). How many of us have joked that it “…followed us home from the shop or the show?…”

I didn’t start out to accumulate a stash, but I’ve certainly got a beautiful one. It’s come in darn handy during the pandemic, when I wasn’t shopping in stores for months at a time. If you’ve seen any of my Facebook Live posts on Wednesdays at 10 on my business FB live page, you’ve seen this in the background…

Close up of the woven stash that I have in my workroom.

I’m not going to say that it just looks like a lot - it IS a lot of fabric. Those photo boxes on the second to the bottom shelf contain my fat quarter stash, and there’s more there that you think. With the exception of scraps, and my batik fabrics, and my wideback bin (consigned to the bottom of the closet), this is the majority of the stash.

What’s the old saying ? Out of sight, out of mind?

Is it too much? My current thinking is that it’s just enough. I can happily sew from my stash for the forseeable future. I know I’m going to regret that, but it’s true. My design aesthetic doesn’t depend on current collections from fabric companies, but rather beautiful fabrics that I (and you) have been buying for years. I want to give you fresh ideas so that you can get them out and work with them.

I have been quilting for over 25 years, but for a big portion of that time, I didn’t have a beautiful room all my own; there wasn’t space in this house when we were raising our sons. It was only when they grew up and moved out onto their own that I took over what had been one of the bedrooms. With fabric stashed everywhere, I didn’t have a way to see what I was accumulating all at once.

So first off, start with the space you have to work with. It doesn’t matter how big (or small) it is. The key concept for me is workflow - how do you quilt? Do you buy just for projects you’re currently working on, or are you building a stash? Can you leave it out, or do you only have access to it while you’re actually sewing? Getting it out/putting it away again takes emotional and physical energy.

The key to making this work is the way my fabric is organized and accessible to me. I have developed a strong workflow that I use when I am working on a design project - most of which is scrap or stash based. I keep my scraps separate from my fat quarters and my yadage, and each segment is organized the same way - by color. Repeating the same system allows me to move quickly form one sector to the next (and back again)…it also allows me to spot holes in my stash that need to be filled.

If you have too much of one color/ and not enough of another, that’s a fixable and manageable issue. Once you identify the colors you’re lacking, you’re better set to fill in what you need. If you know you need pink (for example), you can be on the look out at shops, destash sights, guild meetings. yard sales and the like. It’s a bit like a treasure hunt if you think of it that way. Put out a call to fellow quilters - I’ve got a bag of fabrics to swap, does anyone else? If you use yardage as the ‘currency’, it’s easier - you can swap a yard of fabric you no longer need/want for equivalent yardage - whether that’s half yards, FQs, whatever works. I recently swapped with a fellow quilter - I had 2 yards of fabric she was short, and I asked for equivalent amount in whites/beiges/light grays. Both happy campers in the end.

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Today’s blog post is the beginning of a multi part series that is going to attempt to answer the age old question of how MUCH fabric do you need in your stash…from a stash quilter’s point of view. Part two of the series will give you some of my ideas about how to make your quilter’s dollar go further, and you can find that post here. Part three will follow on Tuesday, May 11, and will take you with me on a Field Trip.