Fabric Heaven

For as artsy as Seattle is, there is a surprising lack of fabric and craft stores. So when I go to Portland, I try to go to Fabric Depot if I can. I could spend hours and hours there, and hundreds of THOUSANDS of dollars. Seriously, it's like heaven. This is only about one quarter of the store.

Cotton Addiction

I have about 10,000 things to do before next Friday, so of course, I spent all of yesterday afternoon and most of today sorting and folding fabric - which was NOT on the list of things that I needed to do. I have reached an important conclusion:

• I have a problem

Other important conclusions reached over the last couple of days:

• I love the way folded fabric looks, especially when it is all folded the same size
• I wish I had a sewing room and shelves instead of an armoire and a table
• I have far too many scraps that I will never do anything with because I hate doing fiddly things with tiny amouts of fabric

I used a tutorial (that I cannot find at this moment) for folding fabric using my ruler and it worked beautifully. I tend to mix cotton and some other fabric for making bags about 75% of the time, so I do have a pretty good mix of types of fabric in each color. I apparently love blue, because I have twice as much of that color as any other color. =)

In this picture above, you can see how I stacked my drawers. Plain/quilter's cotton is in the front and other fabrics are in the back. Each stack is 6" x 10". There are 9 drawers like this, 3 of them are more than half full and the other 6 are completely full. In addition, I have 1.5 file boxes full of fabric that I am keeping, plus 3 large boxes of fabric that I purged to give to my sister if she wants them.

YIKES.

Reasons Why I Love Freecycle

Free stuff on the internet has it's ups and downs...sometimes you get really lucky and sometimes you get stuff that smells like someone wrapped a dead body in it and stored it in a wall. But for the most part, if you keep an eye on Freecycle, you can occasionally find some cool stuff. Here is some of the fabric (I am keeping some of it and giving some of it to my sister) - cotton, polyester, and t-shirt type knits are the most common fabrics.
It does amuse (and frustrate) me to see how often people cut things out of the center of the fabric instead of planning how to get as much as they can out of a smaller piece. A lot of the stuff I pick up is left over from someone's one and only craft activity, but sometimes you get more than that. Last week I picked up a box of patterns and magazines from an older woman who was moving out of her house after 40 years.
Some of these craft magazines are from the 70s. I may do a post later using some of the illustrations inside. Some are good and some.....well, there are some things that should stay in the past and NEVER be reborn.
Case in point - I didn't even know there WAS a pattern for fake fur boots. I did score some lingerie patterns, although I don't know if I'll ever use them, and some things that may become gifts for the nieces and nephews. If you don't use freecycle, I do recommend at least checking it out.

I've been sick as a dog all week, so haven't done much posting or too much sewing, but I hope to have some things to show you soon. Have a good week!