My (Scary) Fabric Stash Pledge!

So, what is the (scary) fabric stash pledge?

I, Megan, the Quirky Kiwi, have pledged not to buy ANY fabric for one year!

Why?

Here’s why!

As you can see I have a lot of fabric, 292 metres of it in fact! (It doesn’t even include all the fabric I bought to make bellydance clothing with or all my patchwork fabric!) And yes, I brought it all over from the UK to New Zealand with me.

When I was finally reunited with my fabric and sewing machines, I decided to make a dress – I knew which fabric and pattern (Burda 6562) I wanted to use, so off I went.

However, just as I was about to cut into the fabric, I noticed a hole in it. Then I spotted some ink splattered on it. I inspected more closely and found that in 3.3 metres of fabric there was one hole and 7 ink splatters! I was not very impressed, especially since I’d bought it on my one trip to the fabric shops in London and there was no way I could return it.

Well what other fabric could I use? I couldn’t think of anything else in my stash that would be suitable, but the truth was, I had so much fabric I’d lost track of what was in my stash.

At that point, I realised that I had enough fabric to last me a long time and that I should stop buying more until I’d eaten into my stash.

I quickly wrote an email to my friend, telling her that I’d decided not to buy any more fabric for A YEAR, so that I couldn’t go back on my decision! That was on 23rd May 2018.

So that is my Fabric Stash Pledge, not to buy any more fabric until 24th May 2019! (That’s such a long way away!)

Since I wasn’t due to start work for a few weeks yet, I decided to actually sort out all my fabric so I knew exactly where I was starting from and so I could keep track of my progress of actually using up my fabric!

I sorted it all into just a few different categories:

• woven, light weight
• woven, medium weight
• woven, heavy weight
• woven, drapey
• knit, light weight
• knit, medium weight
• scraps too small to make a garment but could be used as a facing, trim, contrast, etc.

Then within each of these I made a pile of patterned and a pile of plain

I’m mostly including the photos of my fabrics for my own reference, but I just thought you might like to take a peek as well.

So here are photos of my piles:

But wait! I didn’t just fold up each piece of fabric and put it in the appropriate pile, oh no! I decided to get a bit geeky about it! So I measured (width & length) each piece and entered notes about every one into a spreadsheet so I could find the info I wanted later on. Of course that meant I could now graph certain qualities of my stash, such as:

Woven vs Knit

. . . and Patterned vs Plain

To be honest, I’m surprised that there’s that much plain fabric in there! However, a lot of it is lining which is usually plain.

I also thought it would be interesting to see which colours I tend to gravitate towards, now I could see my whole stash at once. Well, it turns out I like ALL THE COLOURS! Except pastels, and beige, and white.

It was an interesting exercise actually because I could remember where I got almost every piece of fabric from and what my plans were for it when I bought it. I was also pleased that I was still excited about most of those plans, plus, I came up with some even better plans for some pieces!

So now, I’m happy because I have found a different fabric to make the Burda dress out of:

Let the stash reduction begin!

( Oh, and I can now put all my fabric back into (well labelled) boxes so we can have the spare bed back! )

Have you ever organised your fabrics or made a no-more-buying pledge? How did it go?