Not so much sewing....

more like, getting ready to sew! Costume-making and Santa's Workshop time are nearly upon us! I decided since I haven't had much luck getting to sew lately I'd work on organizing my fabric.  Before I began organizing, I started off by wrapping up small "bolts" of fabric.

I saw this article on Threads about storing fabric by wrapping it around cardboard rectangles.
She didn't give the dimensions for the cardboard, but after some research, I found the comic book cardboard pieces are slightly smaller than the 11 x 7 I'm using.

What happened is that all folded up, the fabric takes up less space! The red and the white on the end are pique knits, for William's uniform polos. My fabric is such a mess that the last time I made him a school shirt (last week maybe?) I couldn't find this stuff, and ended up using interlock. No matter. He'll be in school forever, probably.

The knits don't wind up as neatly as the woven do, but I pinned them thoroughly, so they'll be fine. And look at all the room in the basket! Room for more!! Just kidding. Sort of.

My fabric is loosely  and poorly categorized, however. The basket above is "shirting", this one is "boy fabric". Altho, it doesn't include either knits or flannels. My system needs some work, obviously. I need some ideas on how to separate the fabrics.

These are girl fabrics, which also doesn't make any sense. None of my apparel fabrics are in here, nor are knits, flannels, fleeces, etc. They're all together. *sigh* How do you organize yours? Mine are mostly apparel fabrics, with only a few (percentage-wise) of cotton prints.

The good news is that I'm sorting through my fabric well, and deciding which is "cardboard worthy". Once I get a bin of fabric out, there is some of it I just don't like enough to bother winding it on cardboard. I assume if I'm not into winding it up on cardboard, it's even less likely that I will make something with it.

All of this is about 49 yards of fabric, and I ended up with a big bag to donate, too. I only measured the large pieces and they came to 9 yards, but volume wise, the other pile was just as much, but they were some larger scraps and small pieces. So, probably close to 20 yards.

Note that this is about 1/4 of my total fabric stash. Hopefully when I get through purging, it will be 1/2

Now, once I get it all sorted, wrapped up, donated, put back in bins, etc, I need some ideas on how to sort the fabric. I do no quilting, and very little decorative or craft sewing, so sorting by color isn't really appropriate, I don't think. Have you seen any fantastic resources for categorizing or sorting fabric? Link me up! I'm desperate to get this mess back under control!