Fantastic Fabric Organizer

For today's post my friend Len, from crafty homeschool, shared her wonderful post on fabric organizing. I don't know if anyone is like me but I have a lot of fabric and I feel like I have it under control, except that I have to pull out the boxes and find a fabric that I feel will work. I love her idea of having the fabric easily accessible and still looking amazing. Once I get my crafting area set up I will definitely follow suit with her idea. Take it away Len:

So here of late my fabric has been well a little out of control. I have yard upon yard of pretty fabric all shoved into three bags and a pile of smaller pieces. My dear husband was well, a little irritated by all of the fabric all over my house (rightfully so I'm sure). So I had a brain storm for a cost effective space saving solution to the problem. Well #1 it had to hang on the wall. #2 it had to be thin and #3 I needed it to be fairly inexpensive. Now for the solution, it cost me a total of $22.50 not counting washers and screws (we had those on hand). Here is the finished product (how to will follow).

Here are the supplies you will need, I bought everything at Lowe's, but I'm sure any hardware store will carry the items needed.


The dowels are 3/8" x 48" and are $.84 each (I bought 6)
The brackets where $8.76 each and where 4' tall

I found the metal brackets next to the ladders and some metal sheets. The gentleman said they where used for things like garage door track mounting (not sure what they are called but I explained what I needed and the gentleman knew exactly what I wanted). Then I found the biggest dowels that would still fit through the holes. I bought six of those (I cut mine in half). I imagine that if you had a large wall you could buy three brackets and use a whole dowel. That would give you twice the room to store your fabric with out the dowels sagging. You could also buy taller (like 6') brackets but either you would need a step stool or it would touch the ground, I really like the 4' ones, there is enough ground clearance that fabric is not touching the ground and short enough that I can reach with out using a step stool.




This is the tag from the brackets I bought.
They had taller and shorter ones.



This is the dowel size that I used.
I used the largest diameter that still fit in the hole.

This is the paint that I used it was about $4/can.
You will need to use a primer on the bare metal.
I applied two coats of primer and two of paint.

 

The only thing left is to hang it.

I had to use washers because the holes where to large for the screw heads, so I sandwiched them between the bracket and the screw head, worked great. The brackets are faced that way because of the spacing between my studs. I was able to turn them that way and cut the dowel in half so I ended up with 12 bars to store fabric on. You could turn them the other way, just make sure you mount them on studs and MEASURE it twice before you cut the dowels. You may need more dowels depending on the spacing, I would advise again using the whole dowel unless you buy another bracket as a center support so you don't break the dowels (they are not very strong). I left about 1" on each side, you could put more room on each end (mine could use about an extra inch on each side, but you know hindsight). It works very well and even my husband was very impressed (ok, I think he was happy I finally got control of my fabric).