I came across this Amy Smart blog post a few days ago. It’s a good read and in it, she linked to a series of post written by Radha, the owner of Feel Good Fibers (an online de-stash marketplace).
The psychology behind determining when to de-stash (or declutter) and when to organize is pretty interesting. We all know about “sunk cost” but that’s often not the only thing that makes it difficult to share your excess with others and equally difficult to keep it. It can represent a project you were excited to make and now realize you probably never will. Or, those pieces of fabric can sometimes begin to feel like a massive “to do” list and more of an obligation than an exciting array of possibilities.
In the Feel Good Fibers series was this list of questions to ask yourself about fabrics you’re not quite sure whether to keep or let go.
- If I saw this in a store today, would I still bring it home?
- Do I have a real project in mind for it?
- Does this reflect what I enjoy making right now?
- If space were tight, would this earn its place?
The day I read it, I was looking at my batik fabric. I wouldn’t buy them today, as I rarely use them for matching projects. I either make a batik quilt or I don’t. I don’t mix batiks into other quilts, even scraps. Of the four questions, I could answer yes to the second one. I have a couple of quilts in my inspiration photos that I want to create and they’ll work perfectly for that. One of them is this Plaidish quilt by Kitchen Table Quilting. She has several other examples of the quilt on Instagram. (I have a bag of batik lights that’s not in this photo.)
The batik fabrics don’t need to clutter my fabric shelf since I won’t need any of it until I’m ready to make a quilt with them so they’ll be stored in the cabinet with my priority kits for next year.
Today I’m going through my wide backing. In case you’re curious at how I calculate in yardage for those, this is the formula I came up with – 14″ of wide backing is equal to one yard of regular fabric.
14″ x 108″ = 1 yard
It might be easier to show how I came up with that than to try and explain it in words.
Visualize a piece of 14″ fabric that’s 108″ long.
(The 108″ length is equal to 3 x 36″.)
If you were to cut that 108″ long piece of fabric into three equal pieces and then rotate them – you’d have 36″ x 42″ of fabric, the equivalent of one yard.
(The 42″ width is equal to 3 x 14″).
I have quite a bit of grey wide backing fabric from my JoAnn’s liquidation purchases that I’m working on counting. I’m not thrilled will all of it but, I hope to make more large quilts next year so I’m going to need it! Calculating how many yards it translates to sure will make the decision to keep it a lot easier.
