The Art of Choosing: Organizing Your Stash by Color

The Art of Choosing is a series discussing fabric, color, and the fabric selection process. The purpose of this series is to arm you with the tools and knowledge to build your own color schemes for your sewing and quilting projects. You'll dive deep into your stash, organize it, and hopefully look at your fabrics in a new way.

Organizing Your Stash by Color
Now that we have covered fabric folding and fabric stash storage ideas, let's actually organize those stashes! I am going to focus on organizing your stash by color. Before we dive in, a few reasons why I think this method is beneficial.

Plastic Bin Stash Storage, originally uploaded by jenib320.

It Breaks up Collections
For those that have trouble breaking out of collections and mixing collections, organizing by color is a great way to help you let go. When your stash is organized by color, it forces you to put other combinations together instead. Don't worry, if you decide you want to put the collection back together, you'll remember. This will help you start to look at your stash in terms of color.

It Looks Nice
Especially if your collection is displayed in the open, or stored in a common area, using color organization is rather pleasing to the eye (at least I think so). It tends to look less messy and more organized.

It's Easy to Evaluate
Having your fabrics organized by color helps you evaluate your stash better. It is easy to see which colors you are drawn to and any holes in your stash. This will be helpful when we talk about stash building.

So, let's dive right in. I'm going to show you how to organize a single color. For this example, I am using greens.

Unorganized Stack of Greens

The Art of Choosing: Organizing Your Stash by Color, originally uploaded by jenib320.

First, make piles for each color. If you need help identifying the overall color of a fabric, refer back to the post on recognizing a fabric's overall color. For this exercise, grab one of your color stacks. Here is my green stack. It already looks decent but when I do a full reorganization of my stash I like to get it a little more organized.

Split Stacks

The Art of Choosing: Organizing Your Stash by Color, originally uploaded by jenib320.

Split each color into 3 different fabric groups. 1. Tone on Tone fabrics and Color + White fabrics, 2. Fabrics with Small Accents, and 3. Fabrics with Large Accents. With my greens, I also made a fourth group, Green with Turquoise Accents. I noticed that I had a large stack with these two colors so it became it's own stack. This stack will sit between the green fabrics and blue fabrics in my stash when organized all together.

Organized Stack of Greens

The Art of Choosing: Organizing Your Stash by Color, originally uploaded by jenib320.

Once you've got your fabrics all stacked and organized, put those stacks together. Starting with your Tone on Tone fabrics and ending with your Large Accent fabrics.

This can be slightly time consuming, but I have found it's really helpful to reorganize my stash like this every 6 months or so in order to reevaluate my stash. If it seems too daunting, try to do a color or two a day. I like to do this when I'm feeling uninspired. I find that playing around with my fabric and reorganizing usually helps.

In Color Order

Something New, originally uploaded by jenib320.

I organize my fabric by the following colors:

Red - Pink - Orange - Yellow - Green - Turquoise - Blue - Purple - Cream/Tan - Brown - Black - White - Multi-colored

Don't forget, you don't have to organize your entire stash by color. I keep a few of my very favorite fabric collections intact sitting out in my sewing room. I still have the majority of my fabric organized by color. This is only one way or organizing your stash.

The next post in this series is on Building a Well Rounded Stash.