The reason you don't want to have fabric in contact with wood or paper for long periods of time is because the acid in these materials will gradually leach out and degrade the fabric. If you have ever seen an old quilt that has been stored in a cedar chest for years, you will notice the brown staining along the folds where the fabric was in contact with the unsealed wood. That is acid damage.

Staining wood will not seal in the acid. Polyurethane does seal in the acid, so polyurethaned wood shelves would be fine. Formica shelves are fine too. If you are putting up shelving against a wood panel wall, you would need to make sure that the wood on the wall has been polyurethaned or painted too. (I'm pretty sure paint will seal acid in the wood.)

The paper side of freezer paper will have acid in it (paper is made from wood fibers), so to use this effectively fabric would have to be placed against the plasticized side of the freezer paper.

Anyone who has done scrapbooking may be familiar with "archival quality" paper. This is paper that has been treated so it no longer contains acid. Anyone storing a wedding dress wants to make sure that the tissue paper and box are archival quality; otherwise, when the dress is removed decades later, it may have the brown staining characteristic of acid damage.

HTH!

Mary

Just my thought.....Since you are near the kitchen, your fabric is being exposed to many things; e.g., cleaning chemicals, grease from frying, steam from boiling, etc. Plastic containers with a locking lid are nice. However, if you cook/boil alot, please make sure your plastic tubs/containers aren't leaching from the changing temperatures which in-turn will ruin your fabric. How about storing your fabric in the extra bedroom for safe keeping and just getting out what you need at the time you are working? Once again, just a thought. GiGi

:D :wink: :lol: :thumbup:

There is a residue on plastic if it sets...so get sewing and use up all that fabric before it spoils...cause you can't take it with you :wink:

I would use the extra bedroom!! It would solve alot of your problems.
I'm always back in forth from my room. Unless you cook all day, I'd spend more time in my quilting room than in the kitchen.

How does the daily heat and moisture from doing laundry affect your fabric?

I'm sure if the shelves will be visible from the other rooms in your house you will want them looking nice. Plain naked wood doesn't look that great.

This is the shelving that I use - except mine has blue painted metal supports and the supplier now furnishes white laminated board for shelving

http://www.tennsco.com/zline.htm

It's nice because it's very sturdy, fairly easy to adjust the shelves (the hard part is taking stuff off them before one can do it), comes in a lot of configurations, fairly easy to assemble - just need a hard rubber mallet or hammer (a hammer could chip the paint), not overly expensive.

The down side - it does look a bit "industrial"