A Sewist’s Sewing Stash Storage Story
The stash: a sewist’s burden.
What to do when your stash becomes a hoard?
You’ll forgive me my shocking titular alliteration, I know. I know because…you’re still here, reading!
Every sewist (every crafter, really) has a stash. Get together at a sewing class or a quilting bee or a craft bazaar, and inevitably the talk will turn to: The Stash. Your tools, fabrics, yarns; your patterns, your one-day-maybe beads and lanyards; that bucket of candlemaking supplies. All crammed into that closet or corner or bin stacked high in the garage. You’re a crafter, you think, as you reach for a bottle of fabric dye that catches your eye or the newest rotary cutter at JoAnn’s. You’ll use it. Of course you’ll use it! So you buy it and you add it. To The Stash.
And isn’t it funny, us packratting crafters, that we all have this tendency? So funny! It is The Stash which binds us together, molds us, into the future crafters we’ll become! Think of the projects we’ll make! The quilts we’ll appliqué! The soldering irons we’ll wield! The clay we’ll throw! The shawls we’ll crochet, once they inevitably come back into style! It’s inevitable. Our crafts are inevitable.
You cradle this close, for a while, drawing your power from it. But then, the day comes. Maybe you’re taking out the holiday decorations (or trying to put them away), maybe you’re hunting for that power of attorney you have to get notarized, maybe you simply opened an oft-overlooked closet door. Whatever it is, you suddenly look upon, in the cold light of a weekday morning, the vast stores of odds and ends for projects without number and you realize, even without the help of Marie Kondo, the time is nigh. You must face it. Do you have a stash, or does the stash have you? You aren’t a crafter, you’re a dragon. And you have no Stash. What you have is a hoard.
For me, it was putting away the Christmas decorations this. It was also the layer of dust that lay so thick upon areas of my workspace/guest room/crafting nook which I could not clean because of the precarious stacking of The Stash in order to fit it into my home which forced conviction upon me. But conviction, dear readers, is useful (unlike guilt). It was time to clean it up.
Rule 1: No more items until the current ones are used in my planned projects.
Rule 2: Designate a space and don’t grow beyond it.
Rule 3: Don’t be too hard on myself, it’s just things.
These rules help me. I’m not sure how other crafters deal with their stashes, but I am sure you could read about it somewhere! And while I am usually skeptical of modern culture’s mantra of “buying a THING will help you solve a PROBLEM!”, I did feel that one purchase was warranted: a designated sewing cabinet.
My reason: I had been occupying (monopolizing) the one writing desk in my apartment with my crafting supplies, and truthfully, that’s not very fair to the others who live in our shared space! So I decided that since my sewing hobby is now decidedly here to stay, I could purchase an item to support it.
Plus, the air-pressure elevated insert allows my sewing machine to stay out of the way and dust-free, thus preventing further damage. It also gave me some great thread storage so that I could free the spools from the cardboard box cell they were mouldering away in. AND did I mention it’s on wheels? Now I’m mobile.
Next, I repurposed an old chest of drawers to hold all my fabric and notions, and let me tell you, it is stuffed to the gills. Hence my Rule 1: no further items until I finish the projects (or at least make some significant headway) to which the current Stash is designated.
So what’s the moral of this Crafter’s Morality Play? There isn’t one! Why are you still reading? I don’t know! But I’m glad you did, if only so I could show off my new Stash. Because, I think, that’s what crafting is all about: community. Whether we’re actively stitching or just chatting about the craft, what it’s really about is connecting, and if The Stash is part of that, then it’s good in my book. It just needs a place of its own to rest and be, just like us all.
