10 August 2015

My sewing studio: Storage for fabric by the roll

How wonderful is my husband? Not only did he come up with the opening line for this blog post, but he put together a storage solution for organising my fabric rolls in my storeroom.

The new fabric rack
Putting together some kind of rack has been the plan ever since we built the back end of our house where my studio is, but for some reason this project has taken more than 8 years to do. The original plan was to weld stainless steel rods (specifically SHS) together. The welder to do this was purchased about 5 years ago! A couple of weeks ago as I was searching for something in my storeroom I decided that it was time to do something about it.

The Hubby did some running around to cost out the SHS, and then came across a much more manageable solution, easily available at Bunnings for around the same outlay - Aluminium square tubing, with plastic connectors! This system is so much easier to organise than working out how to weld all the pieces together and get them into a confined space.

He had to do some cutting to get everything the right size, but putting it together was (relatively) painless, and from shopping to putting the fabric into the rack took less than an afternoon.

Here's what I had been living with up until Sunday afternoon:

Before
And what the same area looked like after!

After
What a transformation! I now have everything sorted by type of fabric.
Top Left: construction materials (as dubbed by the Hubby) and empty rolls;
Top Right: specialty fabrics (on left duchess satin, lining and chiffon, and on the right silks);
Middle Right: Cottons L to R - Drill, patterned and homespun;
Bottom Right: Christmas cottons;
Bottom Left: Curtain and Upholstery fabrics;
Centre Left: Poly cottons and tulle.

(Note to fellow stashbusters. None of this fabric is what I would consider my "stash". That all lives elsewhere. I promise that I acquired all, OK, most of these with the intention that they be "work stock")

We have plans of putting a board in where the red tulle is so that I can put my garment bags or boxes of scraps on that level. I still have heaps of room in this rack, and am scouting around trying to see what else I should put in here. (Note to self: Not an excuse to go shopping, nor a challenge to see how much more fabric I can acquire without running out of storage space).

I do have to admit that not everything from the before photo has found a new home yet, but I'm going to take my time to sort out the other end of the storeroom (which is actually longer), and hopefully do some de-cluttering while I'm at it. I'm planning a big reveal when it's all sorted, with a photographic tour of my studio.


2 comments:

  1. Perfect solution and love how easy it was to achieve. Wish I could find that sort of space without it being in our roof space, which we have ladder access to :(

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    1. Roof space would work! Might be a bit hard to see what you have though. What my studio lacks in height, it makes up for in funny shaped hiding places.

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