Thursday, April 23, 2015

Brick packed

My twenty yards from Hancocks of Paducah arrived on Monday - curse them and their everlasting sales, it was such a good deal even with the falling Aussie dollar - but I couldn't put it away because my shelves were in chaos. I'd pulled fabrics for a heap of projects without actually putting them back, and there was stuff strewn everywhere. So yesterday I took an hour and re-folded.



I went with a brick pack of varying fold widths. In the past I've done a four inch fold so I can fit three across, with ends up with three teetering towers and they never quite fit right. So this time I didn't try to make them fit three across, just started at the bottom and layered it up as needed. The idea is that I can see all the patterns and colours without too much trouble, pull stuff out when I need it, and put it back on the top without disrupting anything. It looks fine now ... but we shall see. The Hancocks stuff is in the bottom left there on its own - I'm still at the patting stage.

I call it brick packing because when I visited a lot of Australia Post parcel facilities about ten years ago (public service jobs! full of surprises) a lot of parcels still came bag packed - where they were shoved in a mail bag and the bags were then put in a container. Not a good use of space. But the Chinese were brick packing - not using bags, just taking the time to fit each parcel into the container, and saving enormous amounts of space, although it must have been quite labour-intensive.

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