Fabric Storage

I love the fabric folding idea, however I have a larger problem. I have literally thousands of yards of fabric in bolt amounts. I have gotten cardboard bolts from the local Wal Mart fabric department, but they have since condensed ours to more of a craft store area and no longer have fabric. Any Ideas on where or what to use as fabric bolt storage?….I recently had to move from a home where I had an entire basement as a sewing/craft room to a house where I only have an 8 x 10 room. I have built ceiling to floor shelving on 3 walls but need to find a way to neatly organize everything……Help! – Dee

Dee, you can use this same folding technique with your bolts too and then lay them flat on the shelves you have. Also, if you have a closet you can fold and hang a lot on a sturdy hanger. Then you can hang it on a rod in the closet.

You could make your own cardboard centers. Get some scrap heavy cardboard. (Grocery stores and various other places have a ton. I am forever going in and seeing someone stocking and asking if I can have some of their boxes. They are always tickled to get rid of them.) Then cut the heavy cardboard scraps with a knife to the size that you need. If it helps, the ones that fabric bolts come on are about the same size as a 24×6 plastic ruler.

You don’t need to use that size for your fabric bolts if you don’t want to. If another size might fit better and you could use the shelf space better, then try another size.

Here is a video showing an interesting board they sell. I wouldn’t buy them myself but it gives the measurements on the video so I will probably make something like it out of cardboard. Keep your eyes peeled. After seeing this video, it reminded me of a stack of plastic shoe box lids I once saw at a garage sale for almost nothing and they or something similar would be perfect for this type of thing.

One thing about this board you see on the video: If you use it, you can place the fabric either on a shelf or in totes and store it in such a way that you can easily see everything.

Here’s the video of the fabric boards. You might also search fabric storage on YouTube and get even more ideas.

      -Jill

Photo By: Dyanna

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Holiday Cleaning – Preparing Now For The Holidays

Halloween is over, which means it is now officially time to kick it into gear to get ready for the holidays and to get your house ready for company. It really helps to get your house in order now because if unexpected company comes you won’t get caught off guard. Then you can concentrate on baking, finding gifts and organizing activities without having to worry about deep cleaning your house again until after the New Year.

Hopefully by now you have been inspired to start getting things done a little at a time so this won’t be too big of a job. Here are a few things to work on:

• Get your closets in order. Put summer clothes away and take winter clothes out, tossing as you go.
• Don’t forget your linen closets. Get your guest towels, sheets and extra blankets aired out and put the linens in a handy spot so they are easy to grab when you need them.
• If you have a guest room, get it cleaned and prepare everything for your first guests.
• Get your holiday linens prepared. Wash them if necessary and make sure they’re ready to go.
• Hopefully you have cleaned your pantry. Now you need to make sure it is stocked with everything you need for your holiday recipes, for some quick and easy to fix snacks and dinners for unexpected company or food to take to social events.
• Make sure your fridge and freezer are in order. The refrigerator and freezer are going to work overtime for you over the next couple of months so make sure they’re cleaned, organized and prepared.
• I don’t worry about cleaning my oven at this time. I use it so much for baking that it’s silly for me to clean it right before having a baking fest. I usually wait and give it a good cleaning after the holidays. If it’s really bad or you have company coming and it looks awful you may want to go ahead and clean it anyway.
• This week and next week is the time to do any deep cleaning that you don’t want to have to mess with again until after the holidays– things like washing your windows, deep cleaning rugs and carpets and dusting mirrors, picture frames, lampshades or ceiling fans.

If you have been keeping up with your cleaning you may not have to do any of these. Basically just clean your house enough for company. Then you’ll know it’s done and you will be prepared for the unexpected.

Part of the stress that comes at the holidays is the result of not being prepared, especially for the unexpected things that always seem to come up. Think of it like being prepared for a disaster. If I have a wood burning stove, firewood, lots of candles, blankets and food prepared, I am not too stressed if we lose power from an ice storm. If I wasn’t at all prepared, I would be in a total panic if an ice storm hit.

If you are prepared, you have something you can whip up for company in just a few minutes or if the kids need treats for school, you have dough frozen and ready to be baked in the freezer. I’m not saying that I have everything prepared like Martha Stewart but I do try to have everything together enough so that I’m reasonably prepared for the unexpected. My idea of the perfect woman is a cross between Martha Stewart and Erma Bombeck! Some days I am more one than the other and on other days I totally miss the mark, but that’s okay, because I tried.

      -Jill

For more easy cleaning and organizing tips, check out our Keeping It Clean e-books.

Photo By: Kyle Lease

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Clothes Organization And Storage

It’s that time of year when we are hauling out the winter clothes and putting away the summer ones.  Trish submitted the following question so I will try to give you some pointers and at the same time I answer her.

I have 4 small children and am always way behind. Do you have separate bins for each child and wash each person’s pile separately? Do you limit clothes for each person?

Another is storage of clothes… I try top separate clothes by size but find myself finding a dress at goodwill for the winter and it gets thrown wherever. Should I have a misc bin to organize clothes to put away for later? Thanks sooo much!

      -Trish

I usually wash everyone’s clothes together. If I am washing dark clothes that day, I gather up everyone’s darks and wash those. It seems like if I do just one person’s clothes at a time someone else is running short by the time I get around to them. You shouldn’t have so many clothes for each person that you are able to wait until it is that person’s time for darks, lights, etc. If you o, you have way too many clothes to be dealing with. Cut back on the clothes and wash everyone’s clothes together.

For a family of your size you should be doing about 2 loads of laundry every day (weekdays). That should more than help you keep up with it. If you find it isn’t, then you need to get your family to cut back on the amount of clothes they are wearing each day.

Check out my list here regarding how many clothes each person should have. Each person can wear the same pair of jeans a couple of times at least and if an item isn’t dirty don’t wash it. Of course, the exception is if you have a bed wetter, a baby in cloth diapers, or someone who has been ill. Those circumstances might cause you to have to wash a couple of extra loads of laundry a week.

Clothes Storage

• Sort through one person’s clothes each day. If you sort more than that, you can easily get overwhelmed.
• Be ruthless. Get rid of as much as possible. Toss or use for rags clothes that are in poor shape and give the rest away. Don’t keep your five prom dresses, your fat dresses and your skinny dresses. By the time you get into them again they will be out of date so toss them.
• You can keep 2-3 "memory" dresses and get rid of the rest. That goes for baby clothes, too. If you still can’t bring yourself to get rid of them at least make them into a quilt, pillows or something. I had a favorite formal dress I loved but it was outdated. I took it and made throw pillows for my living room and a cover for my Bible. I enjoy it much more now than when it was in my closet collecting dust.
• Limit everyone’s clothes. No child needs more than five pairs of everyday shorts, four church outfits, etc. The same goes for moms. You don’t need 5 pairs of black pants. If you are doing laundry the way you should, you won’t run out of clothes and you will find that you will keep up on the laundry better because it is not so overwhelming and out of control.
• Let the clothes go. Make a list of what each person really needs. If you have 4 church outfits, that means that you could wear a different dress for a month and not wear the same thing. Two pair of black pants should be enough, one to wear while the other is in the wash. Five pairs of pajamas is more than plenty for an older child. They could really get by with less if they wear the same pair for 3 nights in a row.

• Once you have reduced things down to as small an amount as you can, you can figure out the storage situation. Keep your winter clothes separate from your summer clothes, especially for kids. A little girl will grab her red velvet swirly dress when the temperature is hitting 100 but if it is stored away it is out of sight, out of mind.
• Regarding storing children’s clothes: It is better to store kids’ clothes by sizes or, if you only have one boy and one girl, you can store by gender. The miscellaneous box is the way that Tawra does it. She has a box and sometimes a shelf where she stores the new finds and then when that box gets full she sorts them into their proper sized boxes.

  At one point, Tawra had a large laundry room. She kept 3 large plastic storage containers and used one for each child. She kept the storage containers right there by the washer and the clothes could just be put into their bins as they were washed fresh from the garage sale.

  You could also keep a box or things stacked on a higher shelf in the child’s room. That wa,y when you put away the child’s regular clothes, you could lay the bigger size or garage sale find on the high shelf. Just try different ways and see what works best for you.

  Again, keep the amount of clothes you save to a minimum. No little girl needs 10 summer dresses stored away. Also unless you have your clothes and the space well organized, it isn’t always best to store all of your ll year old’s clothes for 10 years waiting for his one year old brother to grow up. Considering I could outfit a child for a whole season for $10 – $15 or less from garage sales, it really doesn’t pay to store these things that long, especially if I don’t have the space.

Of course there are a few exceptions, like a special heirloom item, an extra expensive piece of clothing, things like little boys’ expensive suits or a special something handmade by auntie or grandma.

Be ruthless. If you need even more help dealing with laundry, organizing and cleaning, you might want to check out our Keeping It clean e-books, which include an entire e-book just dealing with clothes and laundry and with  many more tips like this in it.

      -Jill

photo by: perspicacious

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Do you have a list of typical men’s clothing? My husband wears uniforms to work.

-Angie

It is a little hard to give you a list of men’s clothing without knowing more about your lifestyle. For example, do you go to church each Sunday where he needs dress pants or is it more casual? Do you go out to dinner or over to friends’ homes where you dress more or less fancy, and so on.

Usually, a guy who wears uniforms to work can get by with:

2-3 pairs of jeans (1 pair for work around the house)
1-2 pairs of docker type pants (a tan pair and a dark pair)
1 pair of nice black or brown dress pants
1-2 dress shirts
2-3 polo shirts
3-4 everyday t-shirts
1 pair tennis shoes
1 pair dress shoes
1 pair semi dress shoes

You can add or take away from this list, of course, if something doesn’t apply to your situation. The main thing to consider is how often you wash. If you wash every day, you can get by with much less. A dress jacket is nice for a man to have for special occasions but not a must have. Your husband may love to have a couple of old sweatshirts or t-shirts to wear around the house all the time and, if that is the case, he could get by with fewer nice t-shirts or polos. Hopefully, this will give you a start and you can adjust the list to reflect your needs.

      -Jill

Photo By: YasooYamoo.com

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Mending And Sewing Clothes

We live in a throw away world. From razors, gloves, towels and cameras to dishes and everything in between, we’ve been trained to use it and toss it. We seem to find it so much easier just to toss something than to repair it and keep it. Years ago you would buy an item and expect it to last your lifetime but, alas, not only are things made to be disposable, they aren’t made to last at all. I have bought two larger items just in the past week and both of them broke before I even used them once.

Cheaply made products is another whole article in and of itself, but today I want to focus on one thing we can fix and keep – our clothes. We tend to view our clothes as disposable, too, when we could make them last so much longer with just a little care. Part of that care is mending.

I know that mending is now an old-fashioned word but it could really save many of us a great deal of money if we would start doing it. It doesn’t take a lot of work or education to learn how to sew on a button or to mend a simple seam.

To get a little personal, I had a pair of panties where the elastic was ripped about 2 inches. Many people would have tossed them and bought more. It took me all of five minutes to sew it back together and they looked as good as new.

Another reason we should mend clothes is to help our families look nicer and neater. Even though it is not politically correct to believe it, clothes do make the man but we often send our kids out the door with torn clothing each morning. Even if everyone else is doing it, does that really make it right?

I know that sometimes it is hard to keep up on these things when you are tired or don’t feel well but, let’s be honest, do we find time to do other things like play on the computer, talk on the phone or watch TV? Mending takes as much energy as some of these things, yet we don’t think we have the strength or the time to do it.

I know it is hard to get motivated but here are a couple of tips to help make it easier for you.

• If you don’t know how to mend, learn. Have someone show you or look on the Internet to find out how to do it. We think nothing of spending years and huge sums of money to get an education in so many areas which many of us often don’t use but we don’t bother to take a very small amount of time and usually little money it takes to learn to sew on a button. That is knowledge we will use at least weekly if not daily all of our lives.

• Keep a small sewing basket by the chair you sit in in the evening so that everything is handy. Like with cleaning, we tend to make better progress with a job if we have all our supplies or necessary equipment together and in a handy spot.

  Basic Sewing Basket Supplies

  • Scissors
  • Seam Ripper
  • Pin cushion with Pins and needles
  • Thread – basic neutral colors are light gray, medium gray, cream, white and black.

  I didn’t know for years that light or medium gray makes a great neutral thread so these are important to have but adapt the threads in your basket to your family. For example you may want to keep some brown, red or navy or with little girls in the house, some pink.

  If you don’t have a lot of room, wind some thread on a small card or bobbin to keep in your basket. 

   

• Keep a pin cushion with needles already threaded with white, black, brown, navy, cream, red and medium gray by your washer or dryer. If you find a stray button or see something has a small tear, you can fix it right then, which can keep the tear from getting worse or prevent you from forgetting to do it later.

  Something small like this will only take a few seconds and then it will be done. There is nothing more frustrating than to put a shirt on in a hurry and find a button missing so this could help eliminate small stresses in the lives of you and your family.

      -Jill

For more help with organizing, cleaning or laundry, take a look at our Keeping It Clean e-books.

Photo By: Dvortygirl

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Controlling Dust Mites

I have often said we worry so much about the environment outside our homes but many of us are making our families more ill because we have stopped worrying about the environment inside of our homes. When we are concerned about the indoor environment, we often focus our attention on the wrong things.

Here are some interesting finds:

• Wash your sheets in 140 degree hot water to kill dust mites:

  140 degrees kills:	Less than 140 degrees kills:
  100% of dust mites	6% of dust mites
  90% of dog dander	60% of dog dander
  97% of pollen	69% of pollen

  If your fabric can’t handle temperatures that high, then you can rinse 3 times extra to help.

• Check your hot water heater and adjust it to make sure it is high enough to produce the amount of hot water you need.

• Change your sheets weekly. This is so important– It makes a huge difference. I don’t think we are changing our sheets often enough because allergies, eczema, and asthma are on the rise.

• Be sure to use sheets. using sheets helps control many allergies and common health problems and they are easier to wash than most blankets so use a top and bottom sheet on your beds and your children’s beds, too. Don’t forget pillow covers and pillowcases.

• Wash stuffed animals.

• Vacuum daily if possible but vacuum at least once a week.

• 10% of the weight of a two year old pillow is made up of dead mites and their droppings.

• 80% of the material we see floating on sunbeams is skin flakes, which mites love.

• It is believed that 50-80% of asthma and eczema reactions are a result of of dust mites and their droppings.

• Dust mite and roach droppings can cause eczema sores not to heal.

This is not something to mess with. Stop getting hung up about whether the kind of cleaner you are using will hurt the environment and just get busy cleaning for your family’s well being.

Jill

Photo By: Gilles San Martin

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How To Sort Laundry

Sort your laundry into 3 categories:

• Whites
• Lights
• Darks

If you don’t use Clorox (bleach) in your whites, you can wash the lights and whites together.

If you do use Clorox in your laundry, use it only on white cotton or cotton blend items. This would include things like cotton socks, underwear, tea towels, dish rags, white bath towels, wash rags, etc.

Clorox works great for these things but it will cause nylon, polyester and some other things to turn gray.

Other categories that you can sort into are:

• Towels or washrags and things like them, which cause lint.

• Greasy or extra dirty things like overalls or work clothes. Wash them separately.

• Heavy things like jeans and pants. I wash them separately from my more delicate darks.

• Delicate items like some sweaters or lingerie need to be washed separately on a gentle cycle.

• Throw rugs should be washed separately from your regular clothes.

• Cleaning rags, especially if it is something you have used to clean the toilet or wipe down a floor, should be washed separately from other things to prevent cross contamination. To be honest, I usually just throw these rags away just to be safe, but if you keep yours then wash them separately.

• Fuzzy blankets or things that shed should be laundered separately.

• Bright red items should be washed separately until you can see if they’re going to bleed or not.

  My daughter in law had reddish maroon towels and lots of red t-shirts so she would wash them together and she didn’t have to worry about bleeding.

This may seem like a lot of work but it will reduce wear and tear on your clothes and will lengthen the useful life of your clothes, saving clothes that you would have had to toss because of bleeding and dinginess.

If all else fails, read the label on your clothes.

I don’t always do exactly as the label says but, if you are a novice at laundry, it will be a good guideline. For you more seasoned washers, use your own common sense and past knowledge. These days, many clothes manufacturers say "dry clean only" just to protect themselves, so there are some things you may not have to dry clean. If I pay only a couple of dollars for something and it says "dry clean only," I will wash it myself just because I don’t have much to lose if I ruin it.

You can find many more helpful laundry tips like this in our Keepin’ It Clean laundry e book.

      -Jill

Photo By: Jacob Davies

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