Draping myself in SABLE...!

No, not sable fur.  SABLE as in Stash Accumulation Beyond Life Expectancy!  A common problem among craftsy folk!  Luckily, my stash has not reached that level, but it has outgrown the three drawers I have allocated to it.  And that's not including the leftover fabric I have from my last few jobs (some white handbag vinyl and red pleather).  My stash is fertile, and sprouts tailor's cabbage left and right!

What do other sewists do with leftovers from commissions?  One of my favorite alteration blogs is Fit For a Queen, and that professional alterationist says she always sends any scraps home with the garment's owner in a little bag.  Of course, alteration scraps may include beading removed from a wedding dress when moving a zipper, or buttons, or embellishments specific to the dress.  If the customer wants to alter the dress again in future, she may need those things!  But I doubt my customer wants an eighth of a yard of red pleather, particularly since he doesn't sew.

I made a wedding veil as a gift in 2016, and ended up with about six inches of very nice lace trim left over.  (Alençon, with beads and sequins, and a scalloped edge.)  I kept it because I was giving her the veil and all my handwork on it for free.  But now I wonder if I should have given her the scrap lace, too.  Maybe she would have used it for something.  My family is very craftsy, so we always find uses for such tidbits... a detail on a scrapbook page, a hair barrette, something.  Perhaps I should give other people the opportunity to do the same.  It would certainly keep my stash down.

Here are a few ways I keep my stash manageable:

• Sewing things!  When I get the urge to sew, I go to my stash first, not the fabric store.  I find the "make it work" nature of the operation very fruitful.  (It helps that I don't have a car, so stash busting is preferable to an hour on the bus to go to the store!)
• Making lots of sleeveless stuff... Sleeves take up a surprising amount of fabric, so when working with scraps, I may not have enough for a garment with sleeves.  But I can usually get a pencil skirt, a camisole, or a sleeveless top from a small amount of fabric.
• Getting rid of the stuff that I have "just in case" or because "it might be useful some day".  That is why I finally got rid of some upholstery scraps I had not used for years.  I kept thinking I'd make a hat or a bag from them, but I didn't.  Three years later, I'm glad to free up the space for fabrics I'll love.

My housemate is a quilter, so I see examples of that art form around the house, and it is inspirational.  I lack the aptitude for counting and precision-cutting that quilting requires, and I certainly don't want to get into a hobby that adds piles of fat quarters to my stash, but I have decided to salvage a single square from each project I do this year, and simply sew them into a chess-board like piece.  There are some great examples here.  I particularly like the squares made up of three rectangles, each square then arranged at alternate angles to the others.  I think this would be a nice way to slowly build a quilt, commemorate projects, and make something useful out of tiny scraps I might otherwise throw away.

So that's why "stash busting" is a tag on many of my posts!  I'd hate to end up with SABLE! 

---

UPDATE, April 16th, 2020
Removing the "stash busting" tag because, though I continue to bust my stash, so much of what I sew is stash that the tag ends up not being useful for sorting.