Getting buried in by your scraps of fabric? Well now’s the time to organize them! This has always been an area I’ve avoided organizing because of wondering really HOW to organize them. Well I’ve started a big project of overhauling, redesigning, reorganizing, and renovating (new moldings, carpets, etc.) our home office. I desperately need a more inspiring and less stressful place to work.

So one of the things on my dreaded list of things to do was to organize those scraps. Here’s what I did.

Step-By-Step Tutorial:

• First evaluate the situation. This one is pretty bad. I have a bin overflowing with fabric right now. If I wanted to find anything I certainly wouldn’t be able to at this point.
• The first thing I did was determine a minimum size of scraps to keep. Depending on what you use them for, this will vary. If you’re a scrap quilter, then you can probably use even the tiniest pieces. But for my purposes, I really would never need a piece under 4″ so that was the size I set for myself.
• Next I trim off the “crap” so to speak. I trim off any areas that are just making it hard to fold and will not be useful to me in the future.
• Now, you can group them in a few different ways. You can group like fabrics together. For instance in this picture I have several small pieces of the same fabric I have a large piece of. You could fold them together to keep them all in one place OR you could keep them separate and just organize by size. I decided to organize by size…
• As you can see here, I organized my scraps by size. I also have a pile of scraps that I don’t see ever using so I’m going to give away and then my pile of useless scraps.
• My heaping pile of useless scraps I will throw out.
• This is a pile of fabric scraps that were a good size, but were of fabrics I will probably never use again. It’s just like clothes really. I had a look at all the scraps and tried to decide if I would ever put that fabric in my house or on my body. If not, then it goes in this pile. Some of these were even from my teen years and I would never really use again at this point.
• Large scraps that are about 1/2 yard or so in size. It could be smaller. If it was larger than a thick strip of fabric, then I put them in this pile.
• Medium scraps were determined to be anything that was more than a smaller square, but smaller than a thick strip of fabric.
• Small scraps were fabric scraps that were larger than 4″ wide and were less than a thick strip of fabric.
• After organizing by size, I organized by color, as you can see in this photo.
• I also like to keep jean butts and fronts. I know, crazy. But I feel like one day I will be able to use the pockets and such for a pillow or something.
• Finally, I re-placed the piles into the bin.
• Much better! Now the lid can even go on. I might change what I organize these in and such once I figure out where they’ll go in the “new” office. I’ll update you then if I change that. But for now, this works great!