Organizing Your Fabric Scraps

Organizing Your Sewing Room, Part 2: Fabric Scraps

What methods do you employ to store your fabric scraps? In the past, I would simply discard all my fabric scraps into a bin, only to sort through them when I remembered to. Before long, I found myself with two 18-gallon totes overflowing with miscellaneous fabric pieces leftover from my various quilting projects. It was clear that this system was no longer tenable.

My inspiration for reorganizing my sewing room came from an unlikely source: Instagram. It was there that I discovered a community of fellow quilters who not only shared their quilting expertise but also photos of their sewing spaces, ranging from small to expansive. This is where I found my motivation.

I began by removing my display of decorative items and heading to HomeGoods to search for decorative metal baskets. After visiting two different stores, I finally found what I was looking for. As soon as I returned home, I eagerly began my reorganization project, dumping out the fabric scraps from the two 18-gallon totes. The sheer volume of scraps I had amassed was astonishing. To maintain my momentum, I refused to let myself become overwhelmed by the task at hand and immediately set about sorting my fabric scraps into piles based on their color family. I then placed the sorted scraps into metal baskets of varying sizes, carefully selecting baskets that would support the fabrics.

Fast forward several years and two moves later, I now find myself in a significantly larger studio space. While maintaining my original organizational philosophy, I have expanded my categories and storage bins for my fabric scraps, ensuring that they remain under control.