The unthinkable

I started in on tidying and organising our office/sewing room/guest room yesterday evening. I only meant to sort through a couple of boxes of fabric, but somehow didn't stop till it was almost half done. The really unthinkable part is that I threw out a whole large binbag full of projects that aren't worth completing, fabric that isn't worth hoarding and pattern pieces that don't work. Mostly fabric. A whole binbag of fabric!! Arrrghh!! Unthinkable!!

I discovered a few interesting things, though. At one stage, I found myself labelling a roughly 20 litre tub "Non-stretch dancewear and overflow lycra". Ye gods, I have overflow lycra. By which I do not mean the kind of lycra that ought to be invented to deal with the kind of bodies that ought not to wear ordinary lycra, but more lycra than will fit in a different 20 litre tub. I then found a decent sized carrier bag full of more dancewear fabric that won't fit in either of the two bins. So it's been relegated to the 'deal with later' shelf until there is space. Of course, this might be renamed the 'sew it now' shelf, to minimise shuffling.

Also, having a limited number of shelves and a limited number of boxes in a fixed set of sizes does interesting things to the way you file stuff. You can't be quite as logical as you might like. The original idea was to sort and label fabrics according to their intended purpose, such as 'Quilting' or, say, 'Dancewear'. However, the space/boxes problem leads to odder classifications. Most acceptably, maybe, 'Silks'. Less logically, 'Black fabric'. Hmm. Well, the other boxes were full, and I had a big pile of black stuff (stretch crushed velvet, cotton velvet, pleated georgette, stretch velveteen, mock fishnet and so on) that happened to fit neatly in one box. The fake justification for this is that black is frequently in demand for costumes/gothy stuff, so it makes sense to have it all together, but it's really a product of what boxes I had and the size of the shelves.

There are a few boxes left to go. I just hope that I don't find any more lycra in any of them...