I’ll be honest… I’ve reached a point where I have too much fabric to remember off the top of my head what is there. (And when I do remember, where the heck it is.) I’ve been storing most of it in boxes, stacked sideways so you can see an edge of each piece. Still, I find myself ripping everything out of the box when I start a project so that I can feel the weight of the fabrics. (Must touch the fabric!) I’ve seen other bloggers do various organization techniques with swatches and decided that was just the ticket for my handsy approach to finding fabrics from my stash.

I designed these swatch cards in Illustrator and printed them up on cardstock. (Basically a notecard weight paper you can get from Walmart or any office supply store). There are dotted lines on the sheet to mark where to cut apart and punch holes. One side of the card has space to fill out info about the piece of fabric so you know if you have the yardage for whatever pattern you are looking at. The other side is empty for attaching a swatch of fabric. I just stapled the fabric to the card – when I’ve gotten mail order swatch books the swatches have been stapled and that seems to hold up fine.

I’ve seen the same thing done with binder pages, but I liked the idea of individual swatch cards because I can make one ring for each box and then just rearrange them onto different rings if I ever reorganize my fabric. And it’s easy to throw one of these rings into your purse to take pattern shopping. Besides, keeping my precious fabrics on a ring just seemed fitting…

(If you find me in a dark corner of JoAnn’s petting my swatch ring, please avert your eyes.) I’ve made the PDF for printing the swatch cards public on Google Docs if anyone else is interested. Here’s the link.

In other news, if you remember my entry to the Plantain shirt contest…

I made it to the top 10! Head on over to the Deer and Doe blog to see the other finalists and vote.