I finally decided my fabric had the best of me. I don’t have to have things completely spotless, but clutter drives me a little nuts. I’ve seen several people suggest that they wrap their fabric on comic book boards so I bought a pack of 100 and thought that would take care of the problem.

Uh huh. Please tell me I’m not the only person who is this naive! I didn’t make a dent in it. As quilters, we know that we can make use of some pretty small squares of scrap fabric.  For instance, the pieces that go into the applique for the medallion quilt that I plan to get back to are all less than 6″ and in the first set of blocks, more than half of them are less than 2″ square.  I know some people actually do save these tiny pieces and I applaud the effort but one box of small scraps turned into 2.  And then 2 boxes of tiny scraps turned into 4.  And that all turned into a whole bunch of clutter!

So I am now starting with everything that will wrap around the board at least once – typically a fat quarter or larger.  Rumor has it that someone is “surprising” me with a set of the skinnier ones which I’ll probably use for fat eights and opened jelly roll packages.  For now, I’m just wrapping and keeping the batiks separate from the other fabric.

I’d also read that comic book stores are very used to having quilters come in their store to buy these.  A quick search online revealed a comic book store just 5 minutes from my house.  Who knew! First of all, that’s a whole different world, walking into that store but I digress. They didn’t have a clue what I was talking about initially but once we finally spoke the same language (comic book language, not fabric language!) then it turns out they can’t keep them in stock.  He said they run out of boards as fast as they can order them.  I resisted the urge to ask why they don’t increase the quantity that they order since clearly demand exceeds their supply on a regular basis which would net them more revenue.  At any rate, I ordered another set of 100 online.  I just have to keep reminding myself that it doesn’t necessarily mean I have 100 yards of fabric in that room.  I do have yards in some cases but most are a fraction of a yard so far that I’ve wrapped. However, by the time I get done….let’s just say I’ll be looking for ways to whittle this stash down.  This is a picture of just what I folded last night during a 1-hour show on TV.