How do you organize your fabrics? Leftover pieces? Scraps? (Do you even keep scraps? What sizes?) I think I'm asking more about what you did as a home sewer than as a designer but really both would be interesting.
In the industry, designers rarely do any actual sewing at all. So the only fabrics I used professionally (aside from my own home sewing, of course) were the swatches and headers I accumulated while sourcing and developing a line. These were all kept in large bins under our worktables, where they were categorized by type (twill, outerwear, shirtings, etc.) Nothing too exciting there, I guess.
I don't really keep any fabrics at home anymore--everything is at our Brooklyn studio for simplicity's sake.
Out there we have lots of industrial metal shelving we use to store fabrics. Everything is folded and sorted by color so it's easy to locate what we need and looks neat.
Fat-quarter-sized pieces are kept in some metal baskets (I think they were originally from an industrial dishwasher--I find all sorts of useful things on the streets of our neighborhood).
And scraps are tossed into antique locker baskets to be donated to S's school when we accumulate a bunch. I save anything larger than a couple of inches because I know the school will use everything we give them.
Every once in a while I go through the larger fabric cuttings and donate pieces we don't need to S's school or to people who can use it. I like to keep our inventory manageable. No point in collecting it if it won't get used, right?
