Weekend Project #2 - Stash Crash Diet

I promised last week that I would put my stash fabric on a crash diet with the intent to donate the discarded weight to a friend to take to Mexico for a poor community there. I also promised that one large green garbage bag was my goal amount. I quickly realized that fabric weighs a lot and that I probably wouldn't be able to lift a bag of fabric. Instead I went to my shopping bag collection and filled up four of them plus a medium size shipping box. I was talking to another afriend about my self-imposed project and she suggested that scraps could go to a friend of hers who uses scraps in her creative endeavors so I filled up another large shipping bag of scraps. Here's what the pile of bags looks like in my front hall:

This was a tough project for me. I can't count the number of times I stopped to admire a partcular piece of fabric and wondered what could be done with it only to realize that I bought it for a project I completed years ago or bought it with no intent in the first place. All were put into a bag or box for someone else to use. I had to stop and laugh at myself when I came across a shoe box sized storage bin labeled 'quilt scraps'.... I was so optimistic when I was younger to think that I would have a scrap collection that would fit completely in that small container. The Mexico project is getting a lot of cottons, a ton of knits that won't work for cancer caps and hundreds of cotton and denim squares that I have cut out over the years but have been unable to use up. The scrap bag has just cotton scraps, a lot of which made me smile when I remembered the projects that generated these scraps.

The downside of this project is that I now have to reorganize the stash that remains. In my enthusiasim to find fabric to give away, I emptied a lot of containers, hangers, bags and drawers onto the guest room bed. This mountain needs to be re-organized and put back into the containers, hangers, drawers and bags so I can enjoy the space I have created for the keepers.

Warning to anyone expecting to sleep over: There is no place for you to sleep for the next few months unless you want to sleep with the dogs on a couch.