I love having a pretty stash! I think this is my neatest drawer right now though.

The problem is, when all my fabrics are neatly folded, I don’t use them. It is a pain to pull out 25 different fabrics, unfold them, cut pieces, fold them back up and restore them. I’m a bit of a slow learner, but I recently came to the conclusion that I need to store my fabrics how I use them. See this stack?

It is ten layers of shirting fabrics. Why ten? Because I can run ten layers through my die cutter in one pass. I’m a scrap quilter, the more fabrics in a quilt, the better I like it. I pretty much never use a single background fabric. I like to cut a variety of prints all at one time. My stacks end up looking like this.

Then I lay my stacks in the basket/drawer. As you can see, I’ve got more work to do in this one.

Is it pretty? Not really. But I have eliminated hours of folding, pressing, and refolding. And even more importantly, I’m using my stash. I have a lot of work to do as I’d like to go through and stack most of my fabric (everything in pieces one yard or less) this way. but this will have to wait until I get back to Michigan. That’s where my die cutter lives.

Have a great day!