Sometimes simplicity is best.
I am an organizer. I LOVE to organize things. Basically, that has been my profession for the past nearly 15 years since graduating college. I studied Vocal Performance and Music Education in college, thinking when I started that I wanted to be an opera singer with music teacher as a back-up plan. Keeping my schedule organized over those four short years was the only way I survived that double major! Little did I know that I wouldn’t choose either profession upon graduation.
Instead, I went to work at Nordstrom for a while, completing their management training program and completely drinking the koolaid of their customer service policies. This served me well when I went to work at the City as the Special Events Manager, managing the rentals of three civic event parks, permitting of all special events within the city and producing the city’s own summer concerts and outdoor movie series. I was in organizational heaven. I organized schedules; I organized people; and I organized large public events. I was essentially Leslie Knope, only maybe not quite as loud (most of the time).
I had the most beautiful spreadsheets. Seriously beautiful, multi-sheet, color-coded workbooks of all the event details that I lovingly called “production plans.” After working at the City, I went to work for a nonprofit also producing large community events, including the community’s signature fireworks show on the Fourth of July. 181 Port-a-potties, 47 golf carts, over a mile of construction fencing, 150 recycling boxes, and 300 volunteers… organizational heaven.
I now manage a semi professional choir, which marries my love of vocal music and my organizational skills well… but its not on quite the same scale as my previous work. So I’ve found myself spending more and more time over the last few years organizing and reorganizing my sewing room. From fabric to tools to patterns, I’ve tried to make sense of the sheer volume of items in my sewing space through different organizational approaches.
The sewing tools I have the most of, and use the most often, are patterns. I hardly ever follow a commercial patterns’ instructions anymore, but I do often “pattern hack” different pieces together to get the look in my head. Pattern hacking is faster than drafting a pattern from scratch. I’m often too impatient to draft patterns from scratch if I know I have patterns in my stash I can hack together. I’ll plan another post sometime soon about how I pattern hack to get a particular look… its fun!
So what to do with hundreds of patterns?
I was given this lovely old metal file cabinet for free – a surplus item from an old office. It holds legal sized file folders, which my husband’s office happened to be getting rid of – so the whole thing was “reclaimed” (yeah free)! I’ve toyed with the idea of painting it… I see people on Pinterest painting these with chalkboard paint, but now that it is in my room, filled with patterns, I don’t think I want to mess with unpacking it and taking it back out! So office beige it will stay… at least for now.
But NOW what? How do I sort and keep track of all my patterns? I took to the mighty internet to research what other sewists do for their pattern stashes.
The fine folks over at Colette and Lladybird both explain how they very beautifully packaged up all their patterns into comic book bags with cardboard to keep everything nice and flat. This is so beautiful – and so impractical for me! LOL I guess I could go through and essentially archive my vintage patterns into these comic book sleeves – the ones from my mom and grandmothers that I’ll likely never actually use for anything other than style references – but they are already neatly packaged in their original envelopes and fit nicely into my file cabinet, so I don’t see the point in the expense of money or time (at least at this point).
For now, I have organized my patterns in to broad categories and keep the patterns in either their original envelopes, or gallon ziplock bags. If I make a muslin that I want to reuse for patten purposes, I keep the muslin in the bag as well. I keep patterns that I commonly hack together in the same file divider, but I do not index my patterns or get too worked up over where each pattern goes.
Many sewists are digitizing their pattern inventory, using specialized apps to track all the patterns they own. The Finished Garment has a post that explains many of the different app options. I bet you are thinking that I’m going to tell you which awesome app I’m using now to track all my patterns… well, I’m NOT! As in, I’m not using any apps! Crazy right? I told you I love spreadsheets that organize all my data for me, but they are also a LOT of work to get set-up! The beauty of my old production plan spreadsheets was that I could use the same basic model for all my events, so I didn’t need to recreate the wheel each time.
There is no way I’m taking the time to photograph and enter data into an app for every pattern I own. I literally have amassed hundreds (maybe over a thousand???) – I am way too lazy and impatient to spend my time doing that kind of data entry when I could actually be sewing and creating something awesome. So, I’ll stick to my old school semi-organized file cabinet of patterns and call it good. Plus, I kinda love rifling through my stash and rediscovering lost treasures!
Sometimes simplicity is best. (No pattern brand pun intended.)
(And if I happen to buy the same pattern twice – which I’ve never done surprisingly – I can always sell it in my Etsy shop or on eBay.)
How do you store and keep track of your patterns?
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