Clean Sweep!

This past Saturday we took advantage of something called clean sweep.  Once a year the county has a designated spot where everyone can drop off all the items that are not accepted at the transfer station.  After 16 years at our current location, those items have really piled up!  Everything from defunct appliances, mattresses, construction debris and old tires, ect. are accept, for a small disposal fee.  We managed to fill up the back of my husbands pick up truck.  I was thrilled to get rid of all this junk.  

After the clean sweep of household items I realized it was time to "take stock" of all my fabric and get it into some sort of order.  The same care that I take when sewing does not carry over to the organizational side of my business, I am sad to say.  When I am in creative mode, looking for a specific color or fabric and go digging into the stash, fabric goes flying everywhere and I am not disciplined about putting all this fabric back.  I have also not taken the time in a while to clean the sewing room.  Piles of fabric and scrapes are everywhere not to mention the piles of fabric down on the large cutting table.  It was definitely time for some organization to take place.  I always put this off since it is about as much fun as root canal surgery which I can now say with authority since I had one last month.  

I spent the ENTIRE day yesterday reorganizing my fabric cubby.  It is a unit my husband built me that fits under the basement stairs and is 12" cubes, one on tope of the other and 3 deep.  I was amazed by the amount of fabric i have and this is not the only storage area I have for fabric.  I also found a decent size piece of fabric that I had a small scrape of and said to myself last week, OOh, wish I had a larger piece of that...lo & behold, it was buried up there in the top left cubbie!  The bottom center cubbie is what they looked like before I started.,  As I was finding small pieces of the same fabric in various and sundry locations I of course wanted to put it with the rest of it and found it difficult, especially if it had been placed towards the bottom.  Once I had finished for the day and was standing back to admire my handiwork it occurred to me that if I had a full cubbie the fabric would hold itself up and it would be much easier to pull fabric out of a cubby if the fabric was on it's side.  I flipped the fabric over on it's side on the two top left cubbies and could immediately see how this was going to be a better way to store my fabric.  Now I have to find a way to store all the little scraps so time to get out a bunch of small reclosable sandwich bag and start sorting....EEGADS!  Time to get cracking!