How Big Should My Stash Be?

This question has been batted back and forth between quilters for ages.  How big is your stash?  Is my stash big enough?  How much fabric should be in my stash? What kinds of fabric should be in my stash?  Stash – for those of you who are unfamiliar with the term – is fabric.  Fabric which is either left over from a project or purchased with no clear quilting path for it or bought for a particular quilt pattern.  The fabric either fills a niche missing in the quilter’s needs or it’s simply liked enough for the quilter to leave the local quilt shop with a yard or two of it. 

I know quilters who have no stashes, small stashes, and floor-to-ceiling-come-to-Jesus stashes.  And honestly, before we venture into the territory of how big a stash you need, the first question which should be asked is “Do you need at stash at all?”

When You Don’t Need a Stash

The one rule I’ve had about my fabric stash is this: It needs to remain in my quilting area.  The minute it begins to spread to other areas of the house (unless I’m working on a project in another room), the stash has gotten out of hand, and it’s time to par down.  More or less, I’ve been successful.  However as my quilting areas have become larger and larger, I’ve picked up a bit more fabric than I had back in the early eighties when this magnificent journey of thread and needle began.  So while my fabric does all live in one room, the room is significantly larger than that small corner of the dining room I had back around 1985.  If you’re quilting area is small, you may not need a stash because the fabric could overwhelm the space you have to construct your quilts. 

Another reason a quilter may not need a stash is simply because they do not want one.  When I was first taught to quilt, one of the topics my first teacher talked a lot about was her stash – how much she had, why she had certain fabrics, etc.  As a result, quilters who have quilted about as long as I have tend to have extra fabric laying around their quilt area. 

However, I’ve noticed that many of today’s newbie quilters don’t want a stash.  It has nothing to do with the size of their living or quilting space.  It has to do with their philosophy towards minimalism and simplifying their lives.  They purchase the fabric they need as they need it, buying only what the pattern requires, and giving away or donating most (if anything) that’s left over. 

If your quilting space is small, you’re a minimalist, or you simply don’t want to deal with lots of fabric hanging out in your quilt room with no clear purpose in mind, really consider if you need a stash at all.   It may be more of a burden to you than a help.

I’m the Kind of Quilter Who Needs a Stash

Okay, so you’ve looked around your quilting area and have decided it can hold a bit of extra fabric, you don’t mind having that extra fabric around, and minimalism isn’t in your lifestyle vocabulary.  How large does your stash really need to be in order to be useful, but still not overwhelming? Ideally, a quilter’s stash should be large enough to comfortably complete the projects you are currently working on or planning to make, but not so large that it becomes overwhelming or takes up too much space.  The size of your stash ideally depends on your quilting style, project types, and personal preferences. 

Let’s break down those last three phrases: Quilting style, project types, and personal preferences.  If our stash size depends on these three, it’s important to know exactly what they are.

Quilting Style – Please realize we are painting with broad strokes with this one.  I know quilters can switch up styles just to have a change of pace.  They can go from making 30 years’ worth of traditional quilts and then jump track to make a few art quilts just to see if they like that genre.  However, let’s look at your overall quilting style.  Do you primarily make traditional quilts?  Are they nearly all pieced?  Are you a mainly modern quilter?  An applique aficionado?  Here’s a hint.  If you’re not sure yourself, ask your quilting friends.  Believe me, they probably have you pegged. 

Why is this important? If you’re carefully curating your stash, and let’s say you’re a modern quilter, it would make little sense to have a large portion of your stash in Reproduction Fabrics. You may occasionally make a quilt with those fabrics, but by and in large, your quilts are modern, which means you use a lot of fabrics for negative space (usually solids or small prints which read as solids), and bright hues. Purchases for your stash would reflect the modern quilt style.  And while you may very well have some 1930’s Reproduction Fabric tucked away or some traditional florals, those will not be the bulk of your fabric. 

Your stash should contain fabrics which reflect the types of quilts you make the majority of the time.  Otherwise, those other fabrics will languish in the corner of a box or shelf and never reach their potential

Project Types – We will also paint this category with broad strokes, because we all know quilters make all kinds of quilty objects.  So, again, review the types of projects you’ve made.  Are those mainly bed quilts, wall hangings, lap quilts, small quilts, or bags and pillows?  The fabric cuts in your stash should reflect the majority of your projects.  If you primarily make bed quilts, you’ll have more yardage in your stash than fat quarters.  If wall hangings or small quilts are your favorite, yard cuts, half-yard cuts, and fat quarters work well in that stash.  With bags, you may have the standard quilting supplies in your stash (fabric, batting, and backing) as well as the specialty notions bags need.  But again, we’re looking broadly at this category.  So if wall quilts make up the majority of your project type, it would not make a whole lot of sense to have lots of five-yard cuts in your stash.

Personal Preferences – This part can be a bit tricky.  Ideally a quilt – no matter how large or how small – needs lights, mediums (also known as blenders), and darks.  However, I can tell you from experience that capturing true darks can be difficult for two reasons.  First, there are fewer dark fabrics printed (most quilting fabrics are actually mediums).  Second, most quilters don’t naturally gravitate to darks.  Again, mediums tend to grab most of our attention.  So, you may find your stash contains mediums, lots of your favorite colors, and many fabrics from your favorite designers.  A quick glance at my stash will show lots of yellows, pinks, and corals (my favorite quilting colors) and Fig Tree Fabrics (my favorite designer).  But a balanced stash needs to have mediums, darks, and lights.  You may find yourself like me – if I feel I need to add to my stash, I have to critically look at what I have and purchase more of what I need (such as darks) rather than what I like (which would be Fig Tree).

However, the neat thing about curating a stash is it does reflect who you are as a quilter.  As you balance lights, mediums, and darks, you may find you have an affinity for small prints which can read as solids but are so much more interesting than solids.  Or you may discover you love batik fabrics or fabrics which can “read” as batiks.  These facts and fabrics help you develop part of your quilting style.  You may make dozens of pieced quilts, but folks can recognize them as distinctly yours partly because of your personal preferences.

Important Facts to Remember as You Build Your Stash

In 2014, the National Quilters Association surveyed hundreds of quilters about their stash.  Through their research, they discovered the average quilter’s stash was worth $6,000.  Allowing 2024’s  inflation, the fabric stored in your quilt room could be worth as much as $7,897.  Of course, this figure depends on whether you have antique fabric or super-fancy designer fabric.  Your stash could be worth more or less subject to these circumstances.  However, if your stash is worth that amount of money, you certainly want to make sure you can use it to its greatest ability.  Instead of purchasing fabric willy-nilly all the time (purchasing willy-nilly some of the time if perfectly fine), it’s good to remember these key points.

1.  Fabric Type

Consider what type of fabric you need.  If you need background fabrics, you will probably want to purchase larger cuts of this.  The same with focus fabrics.  Accent prints (such as your mediums and darks) won’t need as much yardage.  And while solid fabrics aren’t my favorite, they do make great binding.  A couple of yards of solid black (or another color) fabric is often enough to bind several quilts.  Keeping in mind you will need lights, mediums, and darks, you will have to decide what types of fabric will fill those slots.  Fabric types are blenders, neutrals, solids and solid-ish fabrics, and focus fabrics.

Blender fabric is a quilting fabric with a small, tone-on-tone print which looks like a solid color from a distance.  It’s used to pull together (blend) different elements of a quilt, such sashing, backing, and binding.  I’ve often called blenders the “little black dress” of stash.  You can use them to dress up a quilt or make the quilt very casual – it all depends on how you use them.  Most blenders are mediums:

Meaning they will appear gray in a black and white photo.  While they are crucial to a good quilt, the use of too many blenders in a quilt can make it appear “muddy,” which means if you take a black and white photo of your quilt, most of the top will appear gray, instead of having a balance between lights, mediums, and darks. 

Blender fabric is non-directional.  The pattern is small enough you can cut in any direction without changing the design.  The print is subtle – often less than an inch and draws the eye to the main section of the quilt without overwhelming the viewer.  And blenders can be extremely versatile.  They can add character and interest to quilts, especially when you need similar colors but different textures, or when you don’t have enough of a specific fabric. 

Neutrals are white, beige, tan, ivory, cream, gray, and black – which means if you use black as a neutral, you have your dark!  Lots of neutrals can also be eco-friendly, meaning they are made from renewable resources, free of harmful chemicals, and manufactured using low-carbon processes.  I call neutrals my “family therapist” quilt fabric – they are used to make all the other fabrics play nicely together.  Neutrals are not very intense or saturated.  Neutrals can be solid colors or tone-on-tone.  If you applique, you will recognize we often use these neutrals as our background fabrics. 

A couple of color issues to remember about neutrals.  If ivory, beige, tan, or cream is used as a neutral, they can “muddy down” the fabrics next to them – that is they can make bright colors and hues seem a little tamer than they really are.  They do a good job giving a quilt an “antique” appearance, though.  For scrap quilts, white is generally my neutral of choice, as it makes all the fabric play nicely together.  Blacks and grays are great neutrals, just make sure the accompanying fabric is bright enough to stand up against it – batiks work really well with the darker neutrals. 

It’s also important to consider the batting color if the neutrals take up a lot of the quilt top’s area.  If white fabric is used, pick a white batting.  An ecru batting will throw the white color a beige-ish cast, but an ecru batting works great with the ivory, tans, creams, and ecru neutrals.  If gray or black is the neutral and the quilt top is predominately gray or black, use a black batting — just avoid quilting heavily over the lighter areas of the quilt.

One last word about neutrals.  In today’s quilting world, a neutral can be almost any color.  In the past ten or so years we’ve seen pinks, reds, blues, and a host of other colors proclaimed a neutral and used as such in a quilt.  And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with this.  The only color theory issue to keep in mind is this – you always need a fabric to act as a light in your quilt.  Many times quilters will use the lighter colored neutrals as their light fabric.  So if you do use a darker neutral or a color not considered a “standard” neutral as your neutral, remember to add a light to your fabric pull.

Focus fabrics are fabrics with multiple colors or a prominent pattern within a fabric line which is used to select coordinating fabrics for a quilt.  Essentially it acts as the central color palette for the project when choosing other fabrics to complement it.  Normally, it’s a busy print with various colors which help guide the selection of other fabrics to create a cohesive color scheme in a quilt.  A quilter uses the range of colors in the focus fabric as a starting point to choose the other colors of fabric which will either match or harmonize with the focus fabric. 

I have the most fun with focus fabrics.  They tend to be my “favorite child” in a quilt.  A good focus fabric can give you a color palette to concentrate on as you choose the rest of the material for your quilt.  Focus fabrics are used in the areas of your quilt where they are readily seen because they serve as the unifier of all the fabrics.  So borders, sashing, and the center of blocks are where you will normally use focus fabrics.  A couple of fun facts about focus fabrics:

• Often focus fabrics are used as the center piece of a family or line of fabrics.  Find a current focus fabric and chances are the fabric manufacturer already has a line of blenders, lights, and neutrals to match it.  If you’re lucky, they’ll also have a dark, but that’s happening less and less.  You may have to shop for a dark separately.
• I know quilters whose stashes are only focus fabrics.  These are generally quilters who want only a small stash.  They’ll purchase several focus fabrics they really like, and trust the quilting universe to supply the additional fabric when a pattern is found.
• Have a piece of focus fabric you absolutely love but not enough of it to make a quilt?  Take your focus fabric and find material which will coordinate with it, and then remove the focus fabric from the line-up.  You’ll have a great group of material to work with, that will coordinate, and will make a wonderful quilt.  Bonus: You keep the focus fabric you love.

I realize this is a lot of information, however, don’t get too antsy about it.  The longer you quilt – or if you’re involved in another visual art – the easier this becomes.  As a matter of fact, I’m firmly convinced that a lot of this information we innately know.  It’s already programmed into our brains.  It’s just now we’ve put names to the process, and it may seem overwhelming.  Don’t let it be. 

A couple of additional tidbits before we move on to the last part of a stash.  One fabric issue you may inevitably have to deal with is holiday fabric.  Christmas fabric, Halloween fabric,  Easter, St. Patrick’s Day and even Thanksgiving Day fabric abounds in our quilting world.  Will you add it to your stash?  That’s a really personal question.  If you’re a huge Christmas fan, you may find Santa or Poinsettia fabric will creep into your stash.  What do you do with it?  I keep my holiday fabric separate from the rest of my stash.  It’s just easier to manage that way.  However, on the whole I have found it more economical not to purchase a lot of “in your face” holiday fabric.  So material with Santa and Jack O’ Lanterns don’t take up a lot of space in my stash.  But red, green, and orange fabrics are there.  This way I can incorporate the “regular” fabric into my “normal” stash and use it either for holiday or non-holiday quilting. 

The second fabric issue you may have to work through is the “favorite color trap.”  It’s super easy to purchase fabrics with your favorite color on it somewhere because it makes you happy.  And there’s nothing wrong with having fabric in your favorite color – just don’t let it overwhelm your entire stash.  My favorite color is purple, but that color actually takes up only a small percentage of my stash. 

The last part of your fabric stash to consider is scraps.  What do you do with them?  Do you keep them or toss them?  Do you hang on to them or give them away?  This is an area I struggled with for years because I’m primarily an applique quilter, and with an applique quilter every tiny scrap has potential.  A small scrap could be a leaf or the center of a flower or a wing of a bird or butterfly.  Do I keep it or toss it?

Scrappage is a personal choice.  Some quilters don’t want to be bothered with the issue.  They either toss or give away all their scraps.  They may not have the room to store them, or they may not want to worry about sorting and then remembering what they have.  If you primarily make large quilts or quilts with large blocks made from large pieces of fabric, scraps may not have any place in your quilting life.  But if you do applique (either by hand or machine) or make smaller blocks, scraps may become a necessary part of your stash.  The first hurdle to face is how small can a scrap be and still be worth keeping? 

This is a question only you can answer.  For a couple of years after I began quilting, I kept every scrap.  After I had a pillowcase full of them, I realized I rarely used the small scraps.  So I dumped out everything and threw away the small scraps.  Now I keep only scraps which average 8 square inches and above.  From this size I can get several stems, flowers, flower centers or other applique needs.  I sort these according to color and keep them in bins.  When a bin gets too full, I sort through it again and take the large scraps out I can trim to 5-inch square blocks.  A few years ago, I was introduced to Pat Speth and Nickel Quilts.

All the quilts in Pat’s books are made from 5-inch square pieces of fabric, and all her quilts are scrappy.  When I have enough 5-inch squares, I make a scrap quilt which I generally donate somewhere. 

This process helps me:

• Know exactly what fabrics are in my scrap bins.
• Become more productive in my quilting
• Keep large pieces of fabric out of landfills

In closing this rather lengthy blog (seriously, my blogs keep getting longer – I hope I’m not boring you to tears) I would like for you to conceptualize a few ideas.  First, you don’t have to cultivate a stash.  There’s nothing wrong with not having a stash.  It all depends on you, your lifestyle, and your storage space.

Second, if you do decide to keep and cultivate a stash, do it wisely.  Fabric is a wonderful quilting tool and we quilters get very enthusiastic about it.  It’s really easy just to purchase fabric that grabs your attention at the moment and not contemplate where it may work (or not work) with the fabric you have already.  It’s a good idea to go through your stash about once a year to know what you have and what you may need so you can spend your money wisely.

Third, how you sort and store your stash will evolve and change over time.  Most quilters begin by sorting their fabric by color, and pull the focus fabrics to the side by themselves.  This is how I began.  After a few years, I pulled the blenders out and sorted them to according to color, set my focus fabrics aside, sorted the solids according to color, sorted my neutrals separately, and changed my scrap bins to reflect large pieces of fabric.  Now, since I applique so much, my stash sorting has changed again, and I sort according to color and texture with some of my fabric.  This works for me; it may not work for you.  It all depends on the type of quilter you are.  There are no quilt police and there’s no right or wrong way to handle your stash – just make it work for you.  However, it’s important to remember the larger the stash, the more it requires careful organization and storage. 

Until Next Week…

Love and Stitches,

Sherri and Felix

PS — If you remember my last blog of 2024, I mention Felix has been featured as Mr. December for PawPrints 2025 calendar. Gotta hand it to the cat. He is a handsome devil and very ambitious. Now he has a puzzle gig. His sweet face is now on a 300 piece puzzle. There will be no living with him. He’s already asking for double the treats and two catnip breaks a day.