What to take to a stitching weekend and more craft room.

Thursday the 17th, I will be leaving for a few days to go to the shack and pack it up as we sign the papers on Friday. But after that bit of sadness I will be heading up the street to stay at this bed and breakfast. I will be met there by 8 other ladies for a weekend of stitching! I arranged this weekend in July when I was in Stuart for the 4th and before I knew the shack would sell. I mean really, who would buy my little piece of crap house?
I probably would have chosen a different date for the stitching if I had known. It will be a bittersweet weekend for me. I have a small problem with a stitching weekend though. Never having done anything like that before, I don't know what to take. Do I start something new? Take an old WIP? Something that requires a lot of concentration or something easy? My chatelaine or those annoying 12 dancing princesses? Or do I take it all? I have no idea. What have you done in the past for stitching weekends? I don't want to get up there and then not have the right stuff!

Time for another craft room installment. I showed you how I stored my DMC floss last time so I will continue the tour by showing you my fabric storage. Right now I have my fabric stored in the plastic bin on the right which sits under my DMC cabinets.



Fabric should not be folded. It can be very hard to get the crease out of fabric that has been folded in the same way for long periods of time. I know myself well enough to know that I won't re-fold it in a different way on a regular basis. I needed a new way to store my stash if I didn't want to keep it in a drawer folded in the same way year and year so I asked people on the 123 board about how they stored their fabric. There were a lot of great ideas but none of them were really what I was looking for, or they wouldn't work in my space. Ideally, fabric if it's not laid flat, or hung up full length should be rolled. I knew I didn't have a place to hang it, or to lay it out completely flat as that takes up too much space. This left me with rolling it. Which is all well and good as long as you don't over time smash the rolls down. I couldn't say for sure that smashing would never happen at my house so I needed to come up with a way to keep the rolls smash proof. Cardboard tubes don't work because they are full of acid, so after tossing around ideas, I decided to go with pvc pipe. I had Dan cut the pipe to specific sizes and then seal it as there is printing on it and although I don't think it would rub off I couldn't be sure. Then I used acid free tissue and rolled the individual pieces up on the pipe and pinned them with stainless steel pins. Stainless steel doesn't rust over time. This is how it looks.



Each drawer has a different count of fabric in it and each roll is labeled as to what it is, the size and if it is for a specific project, what that project is. It's very easy to see what I have and there are no creases. The hardest part of this process was finding an inexpensive bin with drawers wide enough for my fabric pieces. To be honest, I'm not happy with the one I bought because my larger pieces of fabric won't fit in the drawers without being folded. But for now this was only $13.00 which was the deciding factor in my mind. I'll have to watch Craigslist for another dresser, this time with long drawers. Alternatively, I can have Dan build me a piece to my specifications which is probably what will happen.

Amy has been sick since Friday. We are thinking it's just a cold or sinus infection as she has no fever, body aches, or chills. Right now she's behind me on the sofa, snoring loudly despite having told me not 15 minutes ago that she wasn't tired. Yeah, right! Snore away sleeping beauty, tomorrow is a school day!

I hope you are all enjoying a wonderful weekend. Thanks for stopping in and commenting. A big Welcome to the new followers! And thanks again for the wonderful compliments on the room and the suggestions for the over dyed threads. I have a couple of ways of storing them that I am pondering, I'll let you know when I get it figured out!