Frugal Sewing Closet Organization

I have told you about 100 times that I live in a small house and I don't have room for a craft/sewing room so I am relegated to our hall closet.  It holds all of my supplies but I actually sew at the dining room table.  My sewing closet has been in desperate need of a makeover for a long time.  I kept looking up ways I wanted to organize it and what I wanted to buy but I finally figured out that I was just going to have to figure out how to re-organize the frugal way.  Someday I hope to maybe make it prettier but for now it is very functional.

Here is the scary before:

 

I found some inspiration from The Little Green Bean who made her own fabric bolts.  So I instead of buying the ones on Amazon I decided to reorganize our games and use the cardboard from them and from the 5 diaper boxes I had been saving to make my own.   I just cut them to about 8" x 10" or so.

 And when I was done I stacked them all in the top of my closet so I could see what fabric I had.

 

Next I had to contain the tons of ribbon I had.  A lot of them did not come on spools (mostly from my Grandma's collection) so those I put in shoe boxes and the ones that had spools I took 3 wire hangers and clipped them and slid my spools of ribbon on them.

 

Here is another picture of how everything fits:

This is the bottom section - the box is my unfished sewing projects.  The basket holds things that need to be mended.  Then there are actual bolts of big fabric in the corner.  On the shelves are my felt fabrics and the bottom shelf is batting.  I vacuum sealed my grandma's extra scrap material because there was a lot of it.  And of course my sewing machine sits at the bottom of the closet.  My quilt cutting board leans up against the side of the closet.

 As I said the shoe boxes hold extra ribbon.  The drawers hold sewing tools, notions and thread.  My patterns are in the magazine holder and the 3-ring binders (I need to get more of those).

And there you have my inexpensive sewing closet.  It did cost me about $30 to put in more shelves (thanks to my husband) but other than that I spent nothing.  I just used what I had.  I am so thankful this is done because it was getting tough to just open the door to the closet.  Now we can open and shut it without things falling out.

What have you been organizing lately?