KonMari Your Stash - How to fold your stash using Marie Kondo folding techniques

hello and welcome to Colt addicts anonymous I'm Stefanie semi today we're going to talk about how I store all of my fabric both at the shop cool adderson honest calm and at home and I have just been devouring the series tidying up on Netflix with Marie Kondo I then read her book the life-changing magic of tidying up and I have been applying it at home so I have removed 20 mins worth of old clothes that don't fit or that I just don't like that much anymore and they are out of my house and I am ready to move on to books this weekend I hopefully will have a much smaller collection of books when you this video comes out and I'll be putting my quilts on storage in my bookshelf so look for more videos on that but one of the things that I really enjoyed about Marie condos method is that she's got a really specific method of folding so that way you are storing vertically that way you can see everything that you have and you can really easily tell what you are missing and you truly need more of verses I have a million of those I don't need any more and I found that it also frees up a lot of space rather than stacking vertically when I was refolding everything to fit in our dresser drawers for example my husband had pared down his clothes and he had still filled his entire dresser across closet shelves with you know his shirts and things and pants and I refolded them according to the Marie Kondo style where they're stacked vertically like this and I was able to fill his dresser now he has a couple of empty drawers and his shelf in his closet is now empty so it just gives you more space so if you feel like you have way too much fabric the problem may be the way that you're folding and storing it not necessarily how it works so at the shop we use these baskets that I got it Target they're really nice I've got this little basket weave on them they're really inexpensive so they're really easy to pick up and just get more of and then they all match and we store our fat eights our fat quarters and our half yards can go in there as well and then they also have a larger size like this and we use that for our full yard cuts because I like to have fewer folds in those so I'm going to teach you my method of folding these again I really like it because you can see everything that you have and for us at the shop it means people can rifle through and grab just a scrap they need for whatever project it is that they have in mind if they're going by color this is what happens when we have bolt ends if there is you know yard and a half or less we just cut it down to go in these baskets at the shop and if you can't visit us in Rock Island Illinois we're going to have a link in the video description down below where you can get a mystery scrap bundle so basically you can choose fat eighths fat quarters or half yards and it's going to be a small collection of it you'll get a full yard of fabric if you're doing the fat eighth or the fat quarter or two yards if you're doing the half yard cuts you can tell us what colors you're looking for and we will do our best to make your bundle fit what you need and what you need for your stash but one thing that you're doing is you're paring it down is I would not feel like you have to keep things that you don't like anymore the last step in Murree conda's method is to do your sentimental so I'm gonna do my fabric last but I know I have things in my fabric collection at home that I just don't like anymore you know I bought it before I realized how much modern fabric was available before I open my own quilt shop and was able to see everything that was out there and it's just not my style anymore so those ones are going to go out and they're gonna go to people who can use them and love them there's lots of great charity organizations that you can give fabric to I know our guild makes a lot of charity quilts so they're going to get a lot of what I've decided it's not really my taste anymore and I'm just gonna keep what I really like but this is a sampling of what we have here in the shop I'm going to show you how we fold it we're going to go through fat eights back quarters half yards and one air cut so that's it I'm going to show you how to fold it and how I stuff everything in here as well so that it is nice and on display just to give you an idea if you use the target baskets like we have you can fit a hundred ates in one of the bins 50 fat quarters 25 half yards and then you can fit about 30 full yard cuts in the big bins like this one so I'm going to show you how we fold it and how we arrange it and it's follows the Marie Kondo method of storing everything vertically which you can see it all less stress on the folds lots of really good reasons to store it this way if you don't want to go buy a bunch of baskets you could use shoeboxes you could also put them in drawers this is especially good if you've got a lot of Sun coming in you don't want to worry about Thanksgiving light damage I know this hutch behind me when I first made it I stored all my fat quarters in the drawers and I modified my folding method so that they would be short enough to fit in the drawers behind me so that's also an option so let's get started all right so I'm gonna start with my fat eighth drawer I don't like to keep anything smaller than a fat eighth because I know I personally am NOT going to use it for anything anything the smaller than that of the shock goes to one of our staff members who absolutely loves making tiny tiny little things and God bless her that's not my my cup of tea but here's what we do again you can fit 100 fat eighths in one of these bins from Target they're really cute they're a great size you can get them over by the storage and organization so just go by where all the bins are and they're on there they've got a couple other colors too but I always get white because I know that they always continue to carry white so I know if my stash grows I can go get more and they will all look the same and nice so let's find a fun print in here and I'll show you how I refold this let's go with the Cape alright so a fat eighth for those of you who don't know is an eighth of yard of fabric is going to be a four and a half inch cut by 40 to 42 inches depending on how long your strip is a fat eighth is going to be a nine inch cut by 20 to 22 inches so you can get a little bit more out of it in terms of cutting pieces for your quilts they're good to store it especially if you like doing applique or you like tiny pieces this is a good size to keep and when you have things that are left over from project this is a good thing that you can cut it down to as well you can cut it into a fat ate the fat quarter a half yard or yard cut and then you can real easily go through your stacks to find out what you have and work from there all right so what I do is I've got my selvage end down here and what I'm going to do is I'm going to fold that in half so that the end that was at that selvage fold what you do when you cutting these is you'll cut your 9 by 40 inch piece and then you're gonna slice it off at the top and that will give you your fat eighth instead of a just plain quarter yard of fabric so I fold that cut edge down even with my selvage then I'm gonna fold it in half again and I'm going to stop just shy of where that fold is cause I don't want the raw edges to be poking out through there that way it looks a little neater when you stash it then I'm going to turn it and I'm going to fold it in half so that way I have nice folded edges on the sides and then I have all my raw edges together and I'm I folded edge there so when I originally organizing this or when we need to you know reorganize our bins because we've had a lot of new ones added to it I will take this all out and I will stack it all up like this so I will organize it all by color border red orange yellow green blue purple and then I usually put black at the end and I usually also start with the whites so it usually starts with white and then goes into the color order from there and then I end with black when I'm organizing I'll share some pictures of what it looks like at the shop so this one I probably would have put it in with the green but it looks like women it was organized laughs it got put in with these Purple's because there is some purple in here so I'll just line that all up and now they're kind of mostly organized there so I can take my bin I can set it in here and then you can kind of organize it a little bit with your hands and get it nice and neat and now we have a nice then to work with and it's going from the pinks to the purples and then finally to the black so this is a fad a thin this is one of three that we have at the shop and they're all in rainbow color order they look really cute and if you have shelving you could easily stack them and then when you know you need like a purple or something that's really easy to go through and see what you have and just you don't even have to pull it out you can just be like oh maybe this batik might work or gee this purple is just perfect for what I mean and you can kind of just sum through and get what you need and again you can fit 100 phat eights in one of these sights bins a target I'll put a link to where you can get them online as well if you don't have a target near you they do ship up alright so now we're going to move on to our fat quarters they are folded pretty much the same way just they're wider and a fat quarter again normally a quarter yard of fabric is nine inches wide by 40 to 44 inches wide depending on how wide your with the fabric is a fat quarter you're going to cut it a little wider and a little shorter so it is 18 inches wide by 20 to 22 inches long it's the same square footage fabric just it is cut differently again so you can have more flexibility in terms of cutting it apart when you go to piece it later again great for if you like doing scrappy quilts or applique paper piecing anything where you might just need like that perfect purple so let's see let's find what we're going to work with today we have a - listo in here this was from her line a couple years ago who wears this line right so let's unfold this and we'll fold it again alright so I've got this wrong side up because I always want to fold the right side coming in so I've got my selvage here at the bottom and then my cut edge is here at the top I'm going to fold that in half smooth it out and just like before I'm gonna fold it in half again and I'm gonna make sure that those raw edges are just inside where this fold is that way when I fold it in I'm not gonna have any raw edges now you kind of have to know where the center is you can always use your measuring mat to do this you can line this up with zero and this up with 18 and then you know you have to into the nine inch mark but what you're going to do is you're going to fold it the outside to the center and then do that again so now your raw edges are meeting here in the center and then when we fold it in half again now you no longer have any raw edges it's all folded in and tucked inside this is the same deal what I do is I will lay them all up and and have them all stacked and I get them in color order the way I want them and then I will just slide this in now if you don't have this overly packed which we don't right now it's really easy to kind of just you know put your hand in there like I just did and slide it in and still get your nicest your edges nice and even I have that single fold edge at the top that way I know for sure how much I have because on the other side of that you're gonna see a double fold versus a single fold so when you pull it out it stays a little neater it's a little easier to get it into the basket as well I find and then you know for sure that I only have one fat quarter of this print not any more than that all right let's move on so usually I store my half yards in the little bins as well but we kind of have a lot of these right now so we were kind of reorganizing a little bit but you can fit about twenty-five half yard cuts in the little bins that I just showed you there's about fifty in this big one that we normally use for yard cuts so I'm gonna pull out here this one some ink and arrow so these are just thicker so the whole Marie Kondo method is that you're supposed to be able to stand this up and it should stand up on its own let's see if this one does it it does okay so you're not going to be able to do that with any of the smaller ones because they're just too little you'd have to put a piece of cardboard or something in it and that's overkill you don't need to do that but once you get to the bigger cuts like this they will stand up on their own and vertical storage and then you can see everything that you have this one is folded the exact same way at the fat quarter the only difference is that you don't have a cut here it's just folded over so there's obviously more fabric here so again what I'm going to do is I'm just going to fold this in half I'm folding that selvage edge down to the folded edge and in this one I'm making sure that my selvage is just a little bit before that folded edge that way that Subway's just going to be tucked on the inside of our fold and it won't be too much of a mess hanging out on the side it'll just look really neat so I'm going to fold it in half again and again I'm stopping just forward that folded edges again so we have nice neat folds on the outside then I'm going to fold those raw edges from that half yard into the center on both sides and then fold it in half one more time and then we have our half yard fold which looks really neat so same deal with this one you're gonna have a single fold edge and a double fold edge I always store them with a single fold edge facing up and again if it's not qu jam-packed in here you can just slide that in pretty easily and then you can real easily see what you have and what you need if you're planning on doing a quilt this fun I have to say is my favorite this is how I store my one your cuts of fabric this is a bunch of kaif and tula that we have we usually bring this with us to shows as well as have it out at the store but I just love how this looks and it's just in rainbow color or and I just can't get enough of it it's just so much fun this is multiple lines of Tula and case all in one bin I've arranged it in color order it just is pretty to look at and feel and if you've watched much Marie Kondo if you read her book she's all about you should keep it brings you joy and what is more joyful than this all right so this fold is a little bit different than what we've been doing before but the concept is still very similar so I'm going to start I've got my whole one yard cut here and what I'm first going to do is I'm going to bring my edges together from the cut end so the one yard to 36 inches I folded that in half so now I've got my raw edges over here and a fold here a hold up top and then of course my salvage on the bottom now I want to get this a little bit smaller I like to have it be longer like this and in the big basket you could fold it the exact same where I had been folding it and it would just be a fatter piece to stuff in you can use smaller bins but I like to have fewer folds on my yardage that we have less to iron out when I go to use it because I'm going to use this for bigger more substantial projects whereas the little ones you know I just a little bit here and there so instead of folding it down like I had been doing I instead I'm going to fold it in half vertically so now we've got a piece it's about 9 inches wide here by 20 inches long so now I can take my selvage edge and fold it up to the folded edge here again stopping that selvage just a little bit before we get to that fold so it's gonna be tucked inside when it's all done now I like to fold it in half again so I've got all my folds and my selvage is here and then I've got a single fold up here and then I can just slide it right in the bin you could get fancy and you could fold it in like this so you would fold your selvage edge into the center and then into the center and then like that you could do that as well and then it looks a little bit neater where you have the edges here and then just a single edge but this part way goes a little bit faster this way you just are folding it in half and then in half again and you're ready to go so if you really want to be very precise about how you fold it you could fold those edges in if you just want to get it organized and neat this is a really fast way to do it this one isn't super jam-packed so I can pretty easily get this slid in here but you could always stack these as well get them in color order and when you have a stack of about 30 just slide it in all at once and you are good to go all right so that's how I fold my fabric and it is very much in keeping with the Marie Kondo style of folding everything you can fit a whole lot in here and it's you could wouldn't have to use you could definitely use your drawers but if you go with the ones at Target you can get 30 full yards of fabric in the larger basket you can get a hundred phat eights in the smaller baskets or 50 fat quarters or 25 half yards so that's a lot of fabric in this little basket 50 whole sack quarters can fit in this little guy so if you feel like oh my god I have so much fabric I don't know what to do with it all you can go through and you can just start by folding and organizing it and it may just fit in a smaller footprint then and if you've got cube shelving you can stack it on top and you can still see it you can just go to your fat quarter band and pull it out when you need it or if you wanted to fold it to fit in your drawers you can make that happen too I personally just love petting it and looking at it when it's all set up neatly like this looks really cute it's really easy to pull it out take a closer look at what you have and if that's gonna work for your project don't forget to check out our website we have debuted brand new surprise fabric bundles so if you want to add to your stash and you need that 8 stacked quarters or 1/2 yards you can get those you can get a yard of fat eights a yard of fat quarters or two yards of half yards and just give us your colors of what you're looking for and we'll do our best to create a bundle that will fit that and coordinate with each other you can get all that at shop dialects Nam is calm when you see these video tutorials and you want to give something to go when you're able to get it from us we love it it helped support us helps us be able to bring you new videos each week now until next week happy quilting [Music]

Channel: Quilt Addicts Anonymous

Views: 320,035

Rating: 4.6880169 out of 5

Keywords: KonMari, KonMari fabric storage, KonMari stash, KonMari fabric stash, fabric organization, quilting organization, Marie Kondo, Marie Kondo folding fabric, Marie Kondo folding quilting fabric, Marie Kondo fabric organization, Marie Kondo fabric stash organization, fabric stash organization, Sewing room organization, Quilt Addicts Anonymous, Quilt Addicts Anonymous tutorials, Stephanie Soebbing

Id: TnHqmf--SZg

Length: 19min 44sec (1184 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 21 2019