Organization for Stencils - A Hack for you!

Organization

Aug 17

Bright colors paired with efficiency - a favorite solution for me!

Last week, I had the chance to do a bit of a workroom tweak - not a complete redo (I shudder to think of that!), but more or less a refinement. In that process, I managed to solve a less than ideal storage solution (yes, I still have them!) that’s been something that’s frustrated me for years. It occurs to me that sometimes, the easiest solutions are right in front of you. Or behind door #1.

The tools that I sew with have evolved along the path of my quilting journey - some have been trial and error, some have been new loves, some are the where have you been all my life. I’ve been collecting stencils almost since I began quilting - I think the oldest one I have dates back to my first quilt class, when my instructor attempted to flesh out the age old instructions “Quilt as Desired”.

That phrase still makes me shudder!

I hadn’t used many for a long time, and the ones I had were in a pizza box on the top of my closet.

That wasn’t very accessible - although they were in pristine condition - and I moved them to a command hook on the inside of one of my cabinets. Then the hook broke, and I knew I needed to find a better solution - keeping them in workable condition, easy to use, and easy to get to.

Poster Board!

The idea to use posterboard came from browsing through Pinterest. I found a pin from h2obungalow.com to be very helpful, although I used her idea more or less as a jumping off point. I adapted her ideas to items I had on hand, and went to work.

For the posterboard case, I began by taking the smaller of the 2 pieces of posterboard and laying it on my cutting table - then placing my stencil collection on top of it to see if it would fit. It did, and so I cut the second piece of board to match - my boards for this are 18 3/4” long and 20” wide. I placed blue painters tape around the perimeter of both boards for strength, sandwiched the two pieces together and then secured the 2 pieces with 3 extra large binder clips. I could then stand them on end and hope that nothing falls out.

Enter the case - that bright pop of shocking pink at the top of this blog post. I knew this storage thingy would stand up on its’ end, and I wanted to make sure that the stencils would not fall out. I simply took fabric from my stash - the bright circles - and cut it about one inch bigger around all the sides…then applied stabilizer to it. I had some left over product from the last t shirt quilt I made, and that was perfect to strengthen the fabric of the bag - and with an iron on application, it’s very easy.

So it turns out that I was a bit snugger on the bag fit than I wanted to be, so I simply insert a bold strip of color into the body of the bag, and closed all the raw edges. I also made some handles for the bag - thinking ahead, I can see a time (I hope) when I’m bringing this to a class, and the handles will make transport easier.

Want to see my case in action?