Stash-management

There are quite a few people out there in blog-land who are doing their best to bust that stash ! And there are oodles of wonderful blogs with easy-to-do scrap-quilts for people who want to make something from their stash and start using it.

Now, my stash is ... a nice size.
On the right hand shelves, two top shelves are batiks, two bottom ones are multi-colours and kiddie-freindly ones.
On the shelves that holds books and sundry stuff, bottom-shelf is clothes-fabrics, second-from-bottom shelf is quilts, and then comes a shelf of "other" fabrics , which mostly means silks and velvets in small quantities, and then comes a shelf of orientals ... which in this case includes japanese indigoes and daiwabos.

Now, it looks messy, but it actually isn't as bad as it looks. The "sundry fabrics" are organized according to colour. One shelf with neutrals, one with pinks and black-greys, one with reds-to-yellows, one with greens and browns, and a full shelf of blues ! I don't use much blue, so whenever I acquire some, it seems to stay on that shelf forever.

Not tooooo big, but big enough to enable me to pull just about anything from it and make something. The problems with my stash are not in its size. At least, I'm not at the point where it feels too overwhelmingly big.
Still, it needs management. And by this I do not mean simply folding and putting in neat stacks (that will be nice too, but not strictly necessary). No, I mean to buy most of that which I use most, and buy least of that which I use rarely.

... and then I need to start using some of the multi-colours. I don't. Which is also why there is so much of it. The problem is, that while kiddies were small, I bought the novelty and "pictorial" fabrics. And with each buy, there was a dream to make something for my babies. Most of these dreams never came through ... which means that compared to any other "style" of fabric (except batik, but I use that a lot !), the kiddie-freindly type is abundant. Further, when I look at what fabrics I have in big pieces (to me, that is more than 1 yard), there is practically nothing but kiddie-fabrics (lovely shirt / dress / shorts -dreams)

Unlike many others, I don't feel a driving need to do stash-busting. I like the variety and richness of my stash. And yes, I do realize, that compared to some my stash is a puny little thing. It is, however, big to me :-) big enough.
SO, stash-management in the coming year will include a pledge, given here, in full public ! to not buy more than I use. From now on, and until I say stop :-)
Can't be fairer than that, can I ?

Oh, and to counteract all this super-woman planning and plotting and managing, and to counteract the impression of messiness given by the picture of my the stash (which doesn't seem as messy in real life as it does on pictures ... guess I've gotten used to it), I'll end with a picture of my work-station in the sewing-room. On the chair to the left (barely visible), Pushkin, the tail-less gentleman, in the quilting-frame, Allsorts, on the design-wall, nothing at all, and on the table, Josephine, my velcro-cat, draped over : notes to the book of Isaiah in Hebrew , dictionaries, grammars and the Hebrew Old Testament.