Fabric stash in the artist's studio

This is a close up of my minimal fabric stash. It's stored in plastic cubes from Costco - the ones you put together yourself. Amazingly cheap, I think I paid something like $19 and you get eight cubes once its all assembled.

Because of the nature of my quilts I use mostly tone on tone, hand dyed and swirly type prints. Having said that, I do find I am beginning to use rather more odd prints in my work. It has something to do with taking a workshop with Ruth McDowell who uses unusual, sometimes downright ugly fabrics in her quilts.

Over a period of time I have branched out into other types of fabric. Now I collect silks, polyesters and velvets to put in my fractal art quilts. It takes a bit of learning how to incorporate these fabrics into patchwork pieces. Sometimes the fraying problem is bad and other times the fabric is so sheer it needs stabilizing. Touch of Gold from HTC is wonderful for stabilizing china silk, makes piecing a breeze.

The fabrics are in colour groupings. All the multi colour prints go into separate piles of light, medium and dark. The bigger yardage goes a the bottom building up to the fat quarters at the top. Of course, this doesn't stay tidy - I always want a small piece out of the bottom ten yards of a special colour.

You can see I keep baskets of threads in other cubes. Small ongoing projects (aren't these called UFOs or Unfinished Objects?) are kept in cardboard trays. They get piled on top of each other and each tray carries the thread and fabric specific to the project. Every so often I am a good girl and harvest through these trays weeding out the projects I know are NOT going to get finished - ever. The thread and fabrics then get re-cycled.

Back to the Artist's Home Studio

Rose Rushbrooke
Artist, Quiltmaker,
Fractalist and Character Animator