2014-02-01

Some stash stats while I'm not sewing

I've been foiled from sewing for the past few days, but there's this, I guess.
The current composition of my stash (by area and by main fiber category):
  • 71% wovens, 29% knits. ("Knits" includes boiled wool and swimsuit fabric as well as the usual jersey, interlock, etc.)
  • 29% wools, among my favorite things to sew, but this is a bit too much given what I typically wear. Recently I've at least been careful to get ones that can be hand-washed.
  • 22% cottons, another pleasant fiber to sew (as long as we're not talking all-cotton knits).
  • 16% rayons. A lot of these are linings, some in rather iffy colors, but I've kept them since they can be hidden inside garments and they don't take up much stash space. I wouldn't mind having more rayon challis if I could find it in nice prints.
  • 13% silks, more than I want, honestly. I know silks are supposed to be nice and all, but the care requirements are just annoying, and for much of the year they seem either too hot or too cold to wear. I also don't particularly like the shine on most of them. I do have several pieces in nice colors, though.
  • 11% synthetics. These get a bad rap, sometimes deserved. Their main advantage IMO is they dry quickly (important for the moment since I don't have a dryer) and some of them don't wrinkle. I'd consider getting more microfibers but not a lot else.
  • 8% linen. I haven't been getting much more of this lately, because where I've been living it hasn't been particularly hot, by my standards — IIRC it's been 37C, once, for a little while —nor is linen a particular specialty of the area. Once I move somewhere hotter I will want more, not least because I love sewing it.
A fair amount of this reflects things I used to be interested in, colors I used to like, or fabrics I kept because they were relatively "valuable" or "impressive". Now I wouldn't recommend stashing so much, because sewing takes time, during which your tastes might change or you might get a better understanding of what you actually like sewing and wearing. One advantage is that it does seem to diminish fear of cutting, for me anyway, since a well-aged stash fabric is so long separated from any memory of what it cost.

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