With the very high bar set on Pinterest for beautiful craft rooms, I am feeling a little daunted by the task of making mine look good enough to photograph.
First off, I have a ton of very disorganized fabric which was folded in every different shape and size. In my last craft closet it, on more than one occasion, the whole mess capsized and spent months sitting in piles on the floor. Upon arriving in Whitewater, I decided that I certainly wouldn't let that happen again. So, I employed a 3-tiered fabric organization system.
Fat quarters and other pieces less than a yard were folded down to the size of a fat quarter (22 x 18), then folded up "Betty's Style" (Yes, Betty's Fabrics has a special way of folding fat quarters. I have a muscle memory for this that will stay with me always). These were then organized by color and put into storage bins.
Large and bulky fabrics (canvas, fur, batting, etc) were put on hangars and hidden in the closet.
For everything else, I pulled out some heavy duty card stock (other people online have used poster board for this--- I used the heaviest 8.5 x 11 cardstock I could find at Michaels) and made my own "mini bolts" of fabric. To do this, I laid out the fabric to see its full length and folded in lengthwise (hotdog style) to be about 11" wide. The good news, 44" cottons folded in half at 22" to fit on a bolt can just be folded in half once more: 11". Done. For 54" and 60" this took a little more ingenuity. I left them folded in half (like they would be on a standard bolt, then folded them into rough thirds.
Once it was folded to size, I wrapped the fabric, just like a on bolt, around the card stock, secured the end with a straight pin to keep it all in place, and made piles by color as I made it through the collection. This ended up taking the better part of a day, but is totally worth it.
I tried to implement a similar color-coding strategy for my yarn, but the outcome was less impressive. I think this was partly because of how much ugly brown yarn I have.
Bins. Yarn was going to require bins. But, as always, bins are so damn expensive. On a trip to the dollar store for other supplies I stumbled across these white "pop corn" bins. They were made of flimsy plastic, but, I figured, might work.
With a about 4 coats of white spray paint (already kicking around the house) I was able to cover up the "pop corn" logo well enough that no one will ever know.
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