There’s a particular moment every stitcher knows. You’re about to start something new, you go digging for a piece of fabric you’re certain you own, and forty minutes later you’ve unfolded every cut in the box, found three you’d forgotten about, and still not found the one you wanted.
Floss organizing gets talked about endlessly — I’ve written about it myself. But the rest of the stash tends to grow in the dark. Fabric, beads, patterns, hoops, the little tools you bought at a fair and haven’t seen since. This is the part nobody photographs, and it’s the part that actually slows you down.
Start With How You Actually Look for Things
There are really only two ways to sort a stash, and picking the wrong one is why so many systems collapse.
You can sort by what it is — all the fabric together, all the beads together. Or you can sort by what it’s for — everything for one project bundled in a bag, ready to go.
Most of us end up doing both, and that’s fine. What matters is being deliberate about it. Kitted projects live in their bags. Everything not yet promised to a project lives sorted by type. The trouble starts when a piece of fabric is technically in a project bag but you’ve mentally filed it as “spare,” and you count on it twice.
That one caught me often enough that it’s the reason my app StitchWIP now marks a piece of fabric as assigned the moment you attach it to a project — so a cut you’ve already promised can’t quietly get promised again, and you’ll remember which project you bought it for. More on the app side further down, but that’s the problem it grew out of.
Fabric: The One Nobody Has a System For
Fabric is genuinely harder than floss, for one annoying reason: you can’t tell what you have by looking at it.
A folded piece of 28ct evenweave and a folded piece of 32ct linen look nearly identical in a box. And even if you know the count, you don’t know if the cut is big enough for the design you’re holding until you shake it out and measure it. So the box stays shut and you buy more fabric.
Three things make an enormous difference here:
Label the cut, not the box. A slip of paper safety-pinned to the corner with the type, the count, and the size — “28ct evenweave, 12 x 18” — means you never unfold anything to identify it. It takes ten seconds when the fabric arrives and saves you every time after.
Store flat or rolled, not crumpled. Creases in the middle of a piece are miserable to stitch over and don’t always press out. Rolling around a cardboard tube is the gentlest option if you have the space.
Write down the size while you know it. The measurement is the thing you’ll want six months from now when you’re deciding whether a piece is big enough. Measuring once and recording it is much easier than re-measuring forever — a notebook works, a note on your phone works, and if you keep your stash in StitchWIP it’ll hold the type, count and size together in inches or centimetres, whichever you think in.
Beads and the Small Expensive Things
Beads deserve a mention because of one trap: size matters as much as color. Mill Hill 11/0 and 15/0 in the same shade are not interchangeable, and if you tip them into one container you’ve made a permanent mess of both.
Keep sizes separate, always label with both the color number and the size, and store them somewhere you can see through. Little screw-top tubes or a divided bead box work well. The same goes for specialty threads — hand-dyed skeins from Weeks Dye Works or Gentle Art usually have the color name and not a number, and once that paper band comes off, identifying it again is close to impossible.
Know What a Project Needs Before You Want to Start
Not everyone kits projects up individually, and you shouldn’t feel like you have to. Plenty of stitchers work from a full DMC set and simply pull the colors they need as they go — if you own most of the range, bagging up every project is a lot of shuffling for very little gain.
But whichever camp you’re in, there’s a version of the same habit worth having: work out what a project needs while you’re still excited about it, not on the evening you finally want to cast on.
If you kit up, that means pulling the fabric and floss into a bag with the pattern. If you work from a master set, it means checking the color list against what’s actually in your set — the greens and browns run out faster than you’d think — and, either way, deciding which piece of fabric this one is getting. Fabric is the part a master set doesn’t solve for you.
Checking a master set is exactly the sort of tedious job worth handing to your phone. StitchWIP carries the whole DMC color chart, and once you’ve logged what you own it shows you which numbers are in your stash and how many you have as you browse it — so spotting the gaps in your set is a scroll rather than a stock-take. It’s the same information a project’s thread list uses when it tells you how many skeins you’d need to buy.
Do that, and starting is just starting. No forty-minute dig, and no discovering you’re one skein short at nine in the evening.
The Digital Side
All of the above gets your physical stash in order. Knowing what you own when you’re standing in a shop is a separate problem entirely — and it’s the one that costs money.
That’s a big part of what I built StitchWIP for, and why the fabric and bead details above kept coming up. Your whole stash lives in one place you can check from a shop — floss by color number, fabric by type and size, beads with their size attached — so “do I already own this?” has an answer that isn’t a guess. And an unstarted project will tell you whether you’ve genuinely got everything for it, or exactly how many skeins you’re short.
StitchWIP is free to download on iPhone and Android.
Don’t Organize for the Photo
It’s worth saying: a stash that looks beautiful and a stash that works are not always the same thing. Matching jars in a row are lovely, but if the labels face the wall you’ll still be opening every one.
Organize for the moment you’re actually looking for something — tired, mid-evening, wanting to start stitching rather than sorting. If your system survives that, it’s a good one.
And be kind to yourself about the state of it. A stash is evidence of a hobby you love. A little chaos is just proof you’ve been enjoying it.
Happy Stitching 🪡 Jessica
Get notified when we post
Tips, app updates, and stitching inspiration — straight to your inbox.