A few days ago, I found myself shopping for domain names. Within the next week or so, I will be embarking on a new chapter in my life and I am feeling the itch to document it. I brainstormed, trying to find a site name that could grow with me and reflect my values and priorities. Naturally, I spent quite a bit of time journaling about it, making lists, and creating vision statements. At some point, I stopped and wondered — is turning*turning a place worth returning to?

After all, my original intention for this website was to muse about all kinds of things that were important to me — not only art/craft stuff, but also simplicity, mindfulness, practical philosophies, and organic living. The phrase “turning, turning” comes from a Shaker hymn that talks about being simple, free, and accepting of life’s ups and downs. It is a song about insight and introspection. Shoot, it’s a song about being flexible and open to all good and simple things. What I’m saying is that this blog was always intended to be about living a good and rich life, not about one craft niche or another. In fact, very early on, there were some posts which addressed these broader ideas.

But, what seemed to happen is this: when I would post something about quilting, I found a community of quilters who wanted to chat about quilting things. Cross-stitch? Here come the cross-stitchers. A blurb about ceramics would bring in a slew of questions about clay. My post about folding fabric seems to have achieved a cult following and to this day I still get emails about my ladder-stitch tutorial. The reality is that my interests are varied, and my loyalty to one medium or another is very fickle. I am a re-inventor by nature and I sometimes felt myself being pigeon-holed into a niche knowing that the allure would wear off in a month or two.

I am also continually learning about my professional life; every day I must balance public and private realms when it comes to making a living, serving my clients, and advancing my field.

So, I’m really not sure if I’ll be returning to this spot or not. There is much to catch up on, and the idea of a clean slate is certainly enticing. But, so is the idea of using this domain for the things I originally intended — to document my attempts at living a meaningful, connected, and purposeful life.

To turn, turn ’til I come ’round right.

Just thought I would check in.

I’ve been missing this place.

A good friend (and amazing art therapist) came over last night for dinner and was tooling around in my workspace. She illuminated the fatal flaw from the pie charts. Several of you also pointed it out. (Leslie, Victoria, I’m looking at you.)

Integration is the key. Combining. Overlapping. Interlocking. I am better focused now after speaking with her. I have clarity again. I remember my bigger-picture goals and I feel like i’m back on track.

• Taking a walk with a friend and bringing the dogs along, rather than always just going out to dinner = fun + chores + health.
• Photographing a project I do for work, or bleeding the project out into one of my own journal quilts or blog entries = work + creativity + fun.
• Taking the stairs, avoiding the cookie counter at work, and planning ahead for snacks = work + health.

At least I made sure not to overlap the dating stripe into the work wedge. Some things just aren’t made for integrating.

I know I posted something very similar a few months ago (I guess feelings of overwhelm are common around here), but it is really hard to fit everything in right now.

I’m trying to evaluate the everything’s place in the grand scheme of things — including blogging.

I highly recommend subscribing to this blog so that you don’t miss it when I do post.

 A new journal quilt, titled “Membership.”  It’s sized around 12″x12″ and was one of the many that I sketched/designed before going on hiatus for my licensure exam.

My next exam is scheduled for this Friday. Oy.

I’m experimenting with new ways to attach the title to the quilt. This is permanent marker on a strip of ribbon, hand-stitched into the binding. The flip side shows the date, ”August, 2009.”

I’ve been using “throw-away” fabric for the backs of these journal quilts — the less it matches the quilt itself, the better. I’m a little bit thrilled to realize that I subconsciously chose a fabric for this cheeky quilt that matches the favorite pajama pants of my ex-boyfriend. I’m just sayin’. You do the math. Membership.

There comes a time when you have to stop planning

(fretting, wondering, worrying, thinking, debating, obsessing)

and just start doing

(moving, acting, deciding, changing, growing, progressing).

Against all odds, I passed my exam yesterday. Thank you for all the well-wishes, public and private.

I’ve got one more exam to take for my license, and will likely attempt that one in a few weeks.

Hopefully I can get back to normal for 10 days or so before the freakout starts again and release some of those ideas that are bursting at the seams.

PS: I passed.

If you liked this post, you might also enjoy:

1. Purpose, re-purpose

I dream a lot. I do more painting when I’m not painting. It’s in the subconscious.

(Andrew Wyeth)

I hate this. I have scheduled my first license exam for 8/10. I don’t really think I will pass it this first time, but at least it gives me a deadline to cram towards.

Unfortunately, it means that I have to put a stop to all creative/artistic work for the next 2 weeks. I can’t sew the beads on the ice cream. I can’t cut out shapes for my next 3 journal quilts (already planned and sketched out). I really shouldn’t even be photographing or blogging.

I guess I’ll just have to reframe this time as an incubation — a preparation for the deluge of work that is certain to come after I finish these stupid exams.

What about you? Are you incubating anything right now? Or are you actively harvesting?

It’s been a bit of a rough patch at work. I know that this kind of thing is to be expected when you work at a hospital or hospice. (PS: “This kind of thing” is death and, whether we like to talk about it or not, death is to be expected for all of us.)

One of the things I like best about my job is that it keeps me constantly aware of the brevity of life, the preciousness of every day, and the power of human connection. I process these big emotions in my art journal, as always. The image above was done in the subway on my way home from work one evening last week.

Bodies and health have been much on my mind recently, and not just because of work. I’m trying to return to better eating habits and nutrition (you may recall), so naturally these themes are showing up in my journals, too.

It is my life’s struggle to explore my relationship to food and its effects (positive and negative) on my body. This image was made as I contemplated last year’s dramatic and successful loss of 80 pounds, and post-medical-crisis plateau in weight. There I stand, a little figure on the precipice of the plateau, wondering how to jump off into the next phase of health.

Thankfully, my journal often reveals answers when I ask it questions.

What about you? Do you journal?

One of the personal issues I have dealt with over the years is a form of disordered eating. These struggles become pronounced whenever I have extended or intensified contact with my family, as I’ve had recently.

I’m happy to say that although I’ve mostly been able to get my binge-eating under control, I still slip into patterns of unhealthy eating choices when faced with stress. I eat out, neglect proper nutrition, and generally choose convenience and comfort over actual self-care.

My recent indulgence has been a treat from Cold Stone Creamery. Unfortunately, the “Ice Cream Dinner” became all too common in these past few weeks, as I compulsively ordered and ate “Founder’s Favorite with chocolate base, please add marshmallows and could I get that in a sprinkle bowl?”

When I needed to turn this ship around, I started to journal about it. I journal about everything that is on my mind, and this was definitely something that I needed to explore.

And, in fact, one evening this week, rather than engage in the behavior, I decided to make a journal quilt about it instead. This is also my submission for this week’s Mini Quilt Monday.

I used Dale Fleming’s pieced circle technique for the first time, and found that it worked perfectly for this purpose.

I even pieced the fabric of the “waffle” to represent the waviness of that crunchy bowl of artery-clogging death.

At least making this quilt kept me from actually having an Ice Cream Dinner for a few nights. Maybe I can finally put this bad habit to bed.

I still haven’t attached the beads to represent the sprinkles. What do you think? Beads? No beads?

I picked up my band sampler again last week, and scanned the list of embroidery stitches I intend to learn and/or practice. Not to be all emo-14-year-old, but the chain stitch jumped out at me as a nice way to reflect the experience of the past month.

I free-handed the text and stitched it on the subway to and from work for a few days using Sharon B‘s hand-dyed mulberry silk. The variagation is so vivid! I really enjoyed the process.

I was surprised at how well the chain stitch handled curves, but a little disappointed in starts-and-stops. Still, I got good practice with it.

If you’re interested in giving chain stitch a try, here are some good tutorials:

• Mary Corbet‘s brilliant chain stitch video.
• Purlbee has good instructions with photos.
• Erika Kern shows you how on Craftystylish.
• Primrose Design teaches chain stitch and also twisted chain stitch.
• SharonB‘s instructions are excellent as always.

I recently reviewed Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book, Flow, the Psychology of Optimal Experience. In it, Dr. Csikszentmihalyi describes what he calls “optimal experience” — being so involved in an activity that you lose sense of time, place, and self. Others call it the Zone. For most of us creative types, I think this flow experience is what keeps us coming back and back and back to our projects.

But, flow as described in the book is not just “having a nice time.” It is a powerful force, and can contribute to better mental health, greater individual complexity, and growth.

Following a flow experience, the organization of the self is more complex than it had been before. It is by becoming increasingly complex that the self might be said to grow. Complexity is the result of two broad psychological processes: differentiation and integration. Differentiation implies a movement toward uniqueness, toward separating oneself from others. Integration refers to its opposite: a union with other people, with ideas and entities beyond the self. A complex self is one that succeeds in combining these opposite tendencies. (page 41)

Csikszentmihalyi outlines the elements of a flow experience — the requirements or steps that must be taken in order to achieve it. Based on his research, flow is broken down into 8 components:

1. A challenging activity that requires skill but is achievable.
2. The merging of action and awareness.
3. Clear goals.
4. Immediate feedback.
5. Concentration on the task at hand (which “removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of everyday life).
6. A sense of control over your actions.
7. Loss of self-consciousness.
8. Transformation of time.

The combination of all these elements causes a sense of deep enjoyment that is so rewarding people feel that expending a great deal of energy is worthwhile simply to be able to feel it. (page 49)

It seems to me that items 1-6 are at least somewhat in our control, and are elements that we can manipulate and employ in the service of achieving flow, while items 7-8 are really measures of the flow experience. They are indicators that we have achieved flow.

Utilizing these principles, I’ve been able to make deeper and more powerful connections to everything from my artwork and writing to watching sports with friends and enjoying a concert from a performer whose music I didn’t know.

I’ll spend some time over the next few weeks talking about some of these elements in more detail, but for now maybe we can take some time to consider the importance of goals, feedback, and internal locus of control can be on our enjoyment of activities. These elements are fairly inherent in art-making of all kinds. In some ways, we are lucky to have such a powerful tool for growth and change at our fingertips.

What about you? Please share with us — when did you last experience flow? What were you doing? How did it feel?

I don’t own an iPhone. Like most outsiders, I occasionally have envy, but perhaps never so much as I do after hearing about  an iPhone application called Brushes —software for digital paintings that can be made at any moment on your tiny screen.

There is a flickr group dedicated to the images, and the application has received a lot of attention lately because the latest cover of New Yorker magazine was painted on it — using nothing more than an expensive gadget and a fingertip.

Predictably, “fine artists” are balking. The age-old question, “But, is it art?“ is being ponged around the globe. I used to have an art therapy professor who insisted that if you didn’t get messy making it, it wasn’t art.

But I disagree.

What do I like about the idea of Brushes? A few things, all of which are in the service of (hopefully) getting more people to do more art:

1. It’s portable. You can always have it with you, unlike your fancy easel, your sewing machine, or your favorite buzzsaw.
2. It’s small, which means that you are more likely to finish what you start.
3. It has an undo function, which creates an illusion of safety in risk-taking and may encourage experimentation.
4. A special viewer allows you to replay your painting, stroke by stroke, which is a neat way to honor, reflect on, and celebrate artistic process.

This was the look of my stats counter a few weeks ago after someone on StumbledUpon and rated one of my posts. It’s quite incredible to go from a few hundred hits a day to a few thousand. Beyond that, though, every time I would see this spike — the visual representation of a sudden and dramatic increase in activity — it felt like a metaphor for my emotional life. Between visiting my parents’ house, relationship stuff, and work politics drama, you may remember that I was pretty maxed out.

Fortunately, I’ve come back down to earth. My psychic energy has been freed up and I am back to working on creative projects and relationship-building in my free time.

News

I was honored to be featured on WhipUp.net for my fabric folding tutorial. Hope people get mileage out of it! It definitely saved us at my mom’s house, and now I’ve folded all of the fabric that I “inherited” from her stash and put it into my own system. I guess it’s time for photos of my new studio work corner. Stay tuned.

I also had a photo highlighted over on the Sew, Mama, Sew! blog. Thanks, ladies! I’m a long-time fan of the Mamas.

Comments You Should Read

Its been a while since we featured comments, but there have certainly been some great ones!

Great reader contributions on my review of Mihaly Csziksentmihalyi’s book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.

Mal, Interesting commentary. I find that for me, being in the “zone” makes me a more relaxed and happier person. And that the creativity seems to unintensionally spill over into other areas of my life. And I absolutely agree that while sometimes creativity is spilling over (I call it having itchy fingers that just want to sew), other times I have to sit down and make myself sew and the next thing I know I’m there, (or in a place that leads me “there”).

Shelly of Shelly’s Quilts

I’ve always found that the first step to “getting into the flow” is just DOING something. For me, it translates to a natural progression of ideas and work and then i DO forget all else. This also happens on the rare occasion that Greyman and i take off for a weekend—-when we are in the moment in the wild of the mountains, our separate ” lives” disappear except for the exact minutes we are there—we have even forgotten about our “babies” for awhile (the cats :}). I have done that at work also while arranging flowers!

There is a very refreshing feeling to this when it happens and it happens often enough that i am taking great joy in my/our life for the first time in years.

Arlee of Albedo Design Journal

On the entry about organizing things in rainbow order, lots of fellow color-organization ”freaks” came out to comment!

Mr. BIV lives at my house, too, esp. in Fabric Land. I have warm colors (ROY) each in their own containers but all next to one another. I have cool colors (G. BIV) same situation. Then a container each for White/Cream, Beige/Tan, Gray/Black. A zipper bag of fabrics which can represent soil (White Sand to Black Clay).

My “theme” fabrics are in their own containers: Food, Quilts of Valor (lots of donated fabric here; I don’t want to mingle it with my own), Reproduction (19th c. vs. 1930s), Holidays, Cats, Dogs, Bounty (harvest related), Tea/Coffee, Critters (mostly fish and birds, but some juvie lizard prints, too), Batiks, Hand Dyed, and Bright Multi-Colored What Color Is It Really? (one container). Probably missed a couple, but you get the idea….

I like the fruit color sorted, though I haven’t done it yet–it looks very cheerful!

Cynthia, no blog (but great reader/commenter!)

Interesting comments, too, when I shared about The Intervention —sorting through and purging my mom’s hoarded fabric stash.

That’s inspiring- seeing all the pretty organized colors, purging, admitting there is a problem, but I can also imagine the daunting feeling hanging over something like that to even get started.

I have the fabric I have because my aunt has brown boxes filling her garage. Luckily though, when I said I was taking a class and needed some- all my aunts opened their doors. I’m working really hard on making things with what I have before accumulating anything more. I only buy something if I cannot in any way substitute something I already have.

Thank you so much for the organization inspiration, congratulations on all the hard work you’ve accomplished so far and definitely sending positivity to you for the future goals.

Liz of Chunk of Cheddar

There were some fun declarations of independence on the giveaway contest a few weeks ago. I encourage you to read them all! Here’s a sample:

I declare my independence today from worrying about the future, it’s a waste of time.

Deborah (no blog)

I declare my independence from procrastination! I’m taking care of some pesky details instead of letting them cause me to fret.

Courtney of Woodland School

I am declaring my independence from thinking I have to do everything without asking for any help.

Patty (no blog)

Finally, some good thoughts arose from my post about video games and creativity (constructive vs. destructive freetime pursuits).

I absolutely believe there is something healing in using our creativity. About a year ago, I went through a bout of depression after losing my job (and the circumstances surrounding it). I did nothing but read, losing myself in imaginary worlds. I read 23 books in two weeks. I couldn’t focus, couldn’t sew, couldn’t make decisions. I finally realized that I had to make myself do something to break the cycle. I chose to design and sew a complicated quilt block. I wanted to do something that required focus and attention to detail, but had no consequences if I failed. I credit that quilt block with starting me back to health. I named it Anxiety. Shortly after that I designed an entire quilt, followed by a couple more. I found a new job, and while things could be better, I also know they could be a LOT worse. I feel my best when I’m working – being creative in some form, even if it’s just figure out a software program at work. It’s when I stop sewing at home that I feel myself sinking again. So… gotta get sewing!

Sandi of Piecemeal Quilts

Good Reads Around Blogland

I’m really behind on my blog rounds, but here are a few things I’ve been reading lately.

• Very cool Genome Quilts project by Beverly St. Clair (thanks for the link, Christine!)
• Beautiful artwork and thoughts on creativity from Gretchen Miller.
• Thoughts on being a “serious artist” from Robert Genn.
• SimpleMom‘s timely and inspirational post on The Clutter You Can’t See. I’m getting better at decluttering things/stuff/objects, but could probably benefit from a deeper cleansing.
• I’m passionately following Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project. More later.

One of the benefits of my job as an art therapist is that even when my personal life is crazy and I don’t carve out time for creativity in my off-hours, I’m required to be creative from day-to-day in my professional life.

When I found a “Fashion Origami” kit on sale for $1.50 at Urban Outfitters, I snapped it up. Origami is a project which, although there may be low potential for emotional expression, is a good rapport-builder and ice-breaker. Particularly in the hospital, where patients don’t have a lot of energy, they can do a little folding project on their lap and feel a sense of accomplishment.

Naturally, the first project I folded from the book was a paper bra. I had to learn this one first. Do you have any idea how many teen boys are on my caseload?

After I folded the grey suit, I couldn’t help but fold a red tie to go with it. “Mr. Herman. Paging Mr. Herman! Mr. Herman, you have a telephone call at the front desk.“ It should be a bow tie, but still.

I (and all my staff) have had a hard time deciphering the instructions for the stiletto shoe, but here we have found a reasonable alternative. It still stands on its own and opens up where the foot should go. That’s good enough for me! Creative problem solving at its finest.

I’m now deep into studying for my state psychotherapy licensure exams. Last week, I came across a homework assignment I had done while in grad school to compare/contrast two different psychotherapeutic theories. I had chosen Solution-Focused Therapy and Object Relations Therapy. I guess I’m always interested in exploring the farthest ends of any spectrum…

At the time, I was doing a lot of professional bookbinding work (including teaching classes and taking commissions) so a lot of my homework assignments in my art therapy program ended up taking the form of books.

This is a double accordian book, like the one you see here. The red strip in the center can be easily removed and displayed on its own, which is one of the advantages of this type of binding. Opening the book from one end shows the first collage, and opening from the other end shows the second. It’s neat the way the concepts interplay with each other with this type of book.

It was really fun to dig through my collage boxes for images to represent different psychological and psychotherapeutic constructs. The one on the right (the baby with the receding hairline and moustache) is to represent introjection. Don’t think I’ll miss that question on the exam!

 ★★★★½ 

Introduction

In addition to having the most unpronounce-able name in all of western psychology, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is also one of the most prominent “positive psychology” theorists and researchers around. It’s no surprise that his book, Flow: The psychology of optimal experience, describes the “state of concentration so focused that it amounts to absolute absorption in the activity.” What might surprise you is Csikszentmihalyi’s claim that flow (optimal experience) is not elusive or mysterious, that it doesn’t just come and go at random. Rather, he asserts that flow can be cultivated, courted, and put to use in our self-development.

I’ve chosen to re-read and review this book because I think that so many of us art-makers have experienced flow, and could benefit from Csikszentmihalyi’s ideas about how to create it and experience it more often.

I’ll cover some of the book’s content below, but you can skip directly to my opinion if you prefer.

Content

Csikszentmihalyi’s optimal experience (flow) is “a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it” (p. 4). Sound familiar? In his research on the matter, he found that,

Contrary to what we usually believe, moments like these, the best moments in our lives, are not passive, receptive, relaxing times… The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Such experiences are not necessarily pleasant at the time they occur. The swimmer’s muscles might have ached during his most memorable race, his lungs might have felt like exploding, and he might have been dizzy with fatigue — yet these could have been the best moments of his life. (pp 3-4)

He also believes that true flow experiences are unique in that they represent an internal re-ordering, and that each time you experience flow, you become a more complex person. He means “complex” in a good way, here — that we become more dynamic, more able to take on challenges, and more engaged with the world each time we allow ourselves to push past difficulty and experience flow in our work and leisure. In other words, these optimal experiences are the fertile ground for growth and personal development.

The book, originally published in 1990, is a different kind of treatise on happiness than most of the self-help books you will find. Csikszentmihalyi’s research focuses on life-work satisfaction (“happiness”), and at the time of publication, he was using some interesting techniques to get self-reports from participants in all walks of life. He would give each research participant a pager and a log book. At random intervals throughout the day, the pager would beep and the participant would record what they were doing, and how they felt, etc. What he discovered was that certain people experienced high levels of satisfaction at work or at play, but not in the ways you might expect.

For instance, we might naturally assume that people experience flow more frequently when they are at rest than when they are at work, but Csikszentmihalyi’s studies suggest the opposite. Because flow is more likely to happen when you are focused on a task — when you are pushing yourself a little bit — it is actually more common for flow to occur at work unless your leisure-time involves similarly challenging activities such as sports, music, art, etc.

The good news is that there is a very specific set of variables that combine together to create flow, and that once you understand these variables, you can (to a certain extent) control them and use them to experience flow more often. That elusive feeling of being completely “lost” in your work need not be so elusive. I will discuss those characteristics of flow in a future post.

Chapters of this book include:

1. Happiness revisited
2. The anatomy of consciousness
3. Enjoyment and the quality of life
4. The conditions of flow
5. The body in flow
6. The flow of thought
7. Work as flow
8. Enjoying solitude and other people
9. Cheating chaos
10. The making of meaning

My opinion

 ★★★★½ 

I give this book 4.5/5 stars. As a person who truly enjoys those fleeting moments of flow that come during my creative (and other) work, it was truly liberating for me to believe that I could control that experience to some degree — invite it more frequently and more deeply into my life and use it to the benefit of myself and others. I have put the principles of this book into practice and, for me, they hold true. The ideas described in “Flow” have encouraged me to spend more of my leisure time in challenging and/or creative pursuits, rather than just sacking out on the couch and watching TV. 

Because Csikszenmihalyi is an academic, a researcher, and a professor, the book does at times run the risk of becoming a bit dry and technical. It was an early attempt to describe his research findings to the general public, and you can tell sometimes that he is either out of depth (writing about topics that were recent research discoveries and, therefore, not as well articulated or understood) or off on theoretical tangents that are of interest to him but may not necessarily be of interest to the reader. Mercifully, he resisted the temptation to fill the book with footnotes and references, and instead includes a detailed appendix with running academic commentary in case you want to know more about a particular subject. Without this appendix format, I would have given the book a lower score.

Finally, the book was published in 1990, and can sometimes feel a bit dated. You get the distinct sense that the spectacular arrival of the internet and its resultant complex global climate would contribute interesting ideas to this discussion. I would be interested to read his more recent publications, but haven’t done so. This book still stands as the best introduction to his thoughts and ideas. I believe this book has the capacity to enrich our lives  on a personal, creative, and professional level and I highly recommend it. 

Have you read it? If so, what did you think? If not, does the idea interest you?

Several people have asked about the techniques we used when cleaning out my mom’s fabric stash last week. There are of course many ways to purge, sort, and organize fabric, which I’ll write about later. But first, I wanted to address questions about the folding station and the folding method we used.

It’s the same method I’ve been using as I’ve been sorting and organizing fabric in my own apartment. Here you see an in-progress picture of my new studio corner with stacks of uniformly-folded fabric. This is a method I first read about from Monica, the Happy Zombie and later from Marilyn Bohn’s video.

Of course there are other ways, but this is the cheap, easy, quick one that works for me. The goal is to end up with a stack of fabric that is uniformly folded — the same length and width.

The height of each folded piece varies according to how much yardage you have to begin with.

To accomplish this, you’ll need a stack of fabric (45″ wide works best, though other widths can be accommodated), a flat surface, and a large quilter’s ruler. My mom had three 6.5″-wide rulers, so we defaulted to using those for her project. However, the cubbies on my shelf are 13″ wide. In order to comfortably fit 2 stacks of fabric side-to-side, I needed to use a slightly smaller ruler. Mine is 6″ wide and 24″ long.

I don’t currently have any fabric that hasn’t been folded by this method, so I had to un-fold a piece to show you how it’s done. Pardon the creases!

First, ensure that the fabric is folded in half lengthwise (selvedge-to-selvedge) with the wrong sides together. Many fabrics (including most quilter’s cotton) are approximately 45″ wide, which leaves you with a span of fabric around 22″ after it’s folded in half. For my ruler of 24″, this is just perfect. It leaves a little bit of ruler poking out on either end.

Begin “wrapping” the fabric around the ruler, starting with the raw edge nearest to you. It’s almost like you’re making a small “bolt” of fabric with the quilter’s ruler where the cardboard core would be.

Continue wrapping (flipping the ruler away from you) until you reach the other raw edge of the fabric. At this point, you have two options.

If the remaining edge is wide enough, you can just fold it over. However, if that edge piece is too small and won’t lie flat, there is another option.

If the last wrapped edge is too small to lie flat, unfold the bolt of fabric and tuck the edge under. Then, flip the bolt on top of the fold and it will seal the edge up into the wraps of fabric.

Pull the ruler out from the center of the fabric. Make sure that it lies flat and the raw edge doesn’t pop out.

Fold the fabric in half cross-wise. (Hamburger fold, not hotdog.)

Place your folded fabric on the shelf with the folded edge facing you. that way, you can see at a glance what colors of fabric you’ve got.

You can see that the finished piece is a little larger than 6″ wide, and about 11″ long. This will vary depending on your ruler, so make sure you understand your shelves or storage spaces before you have to unfold your whole collection!

A lot of people store their fat quarters separate from the rest of their fabric collection. My mom wanted hers kept separate, so we did what Monica Zombie suggested and folded the fat quarters in the same way but with a smaller ruler. I prefer to keep my fabric all together, since I’m generally hunting for fabric of a certain color, rather than of a certain size.

A fat quarter is generally around 18″ x 22″. Using my 6″ ruler allows me to make a tidy little bolt and store all of my fabric in one place.

Fold one edge in…

Then the other.

Just as before, remove the ruler and fold in half.

Voila! If you’re starting with 60″ fabric, vintage sheets, or other odd-sized pieces, the procedure is the same. All you have to do is fold it lengthwise (hotdog, not hamburger) to approximately 20-24″ wide before you begin wrapping. For a 60″ piece, I generally just fold it in thirds lengthwise and it pretty much evens out in the end.

Be aware that extra yardage (3+ yards) will yield pieces that are noticeably wider due to the sheer bulk of fabric as you wrap around and around. You may need to take this into account as you plan out the size of your storage system.

A final thought: This sytem really only works if you are dedicated to maintainence. I’ll post later about my system for re-folding pieces after I have used them. However, I find that the investment of time really pays off.

This method is becoming increasingly popular, but hopefully my tutorial will add something to the conversation. Let me know if you try it out!

Maybe it’s odd, but I love to organize things in rainbow order. Actually, I’d consider it a kind of coping mechanism. When I get really stressed, something about that old ROYGBIV just soothes me.

When I was little, I would sort everything from t-shirts to pencils to food in this color order. I would line up candies in a spectrum row before I would eat them. M&M’s and Skittles frustrated me because they didn’t have all the right colors. Now that I’m older, I don’t have time to be quite so obsessive about it, but most of my art supplies and clothes are still sorted this way.

Am I the only one?

I’ve written about my mom and her fabric “collecting” in the past. Recently, she asked us for help in creating a functional sewing room in her basement, including purging the fabric she doesn’t intend to use. Naturally, I made arrangements to take time off of work and be there with my sisters.

Although she has hoarded for many years, she has never actively sought help, so I was both nervous and relieved as I made the long drive to my parents’ house. I wasn’t sure what to expect. I’m going to spare you some of the details here, but…

At the end of Day 1, we were all feeling pretty good about the progress we’d made. Then, after she went to bed, we found a few more of her hidden stashes and uncovered more than twice the amount of fabric than what we had sorted and folded during the entire first day. Let’s just say the task felt pretty daunting at that point.

Here’s a folding station. The task of sorting and shelving was pretty monumental, and at any time during the weekend, we had 3 folding stations going at once. I’ll probably put up a tutorial on the folding process, since it’s what I am using to stay organized in my apartment, too.

Mostly, my siblings and niece worked at the folding tables, while I sat knee-to-knee with my mom and talked her through everything. (This is a downside of being a therapist, I guess — when no one else can handle the talking, it falls to you.)

I literally spent 3 days handing her fabric, talking her through each stack, and carrying it to her shelves or the giveaway pile. It’s important to note that we went through the entire collection 3 times, each time purging more, until everything she wanted to keep would fit onto the massive shelves.

Here’s one of my macho brothers hefting industrial-sized trash bags of fabric out of the house. We estimate that these bags each weighed around 150 pounds, and we filled about 5 of them.

This is what she was left with at the end of the weekend. It doesn’t account for all of her flannels and other fabrics; we didn’t sort through her books/magazines/patterns; we collected all of her in-progress projects into one place but didn’t get them really put away; and we haven’t even touched her batting and notions. Oh, well. It was a good start.

The shelves look nice, but little empty spaces like the one you see above make me very nervous. I hope she doesn’t go out and binge on red-and-white fabrics just because there is room left in that stack. Although we did a good job of clearing things out this weekend, I think we all realize that we are a long way from resolving the underlying behaviors.

Still, I hope she feels as clear-headed and inspired by looking at these shelves as I do when I look at the photos. I love my mom, and I’d do just about anything I could to help foster her creativity and peace of mind.

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