Sewing organization: The reference card

I'm all about organizing information, in thought at least. 

Photo by Erol Ahmed on Unsplash

Like I like to plan to organize information. 

Not physical things, mind you. My house is a disaster and only some of my patterns and stash are organized.  

With that said, as I run across interesting organization schemes, I note them. In a couple days I ran across a couple really neat physical card methods that I thought I would re-share.

First, on the podcast Stitch Please, S1 E56: Swatching your fabric, Lisa Woolfork describes what ends up being a card catalog for her fabrics. She prints a special Avery shipping label pre-printed with the fields she uses, sticks that to glossy photopaper, and uses a ring system to keep these together with shelf location of the fabric. 

You should really listen to the whole episode. She goes into quite a bit of detail. If you support them on Patreon, you can download her template.

I will say that there are definite pluses and minuses to have an online vs. paper system. Having a little swatch is great. But you have to be where the cards are to make use of them. I've heard of similar bullet journal pages but done in bound journals. I always feel with bound journals that you have to be perfect and you're pretty much constrained to a temporal organization scheme. Using the cards on rings you can literally sort these however you like and you can remove/archive/whatever things that are gone/used up. Or put the card with the scrap stuff or whatever.

Second, Grainline Studios provided a free downloadable pdf of their pattern cards. What's different about these is that they are really more like project based. If you refer to my Air Table organization. they are like my project table instead of my pattern table. A neat feature they add is a list of what to cut out of what. The Necessary Wallet by Emmaline has a list like that and it's super helpful. Come to think of it, I think Love Notions and Greenstyle both have cutting lists, too. Anyway. This is also something you would have in print and keep with your project, I guess? Well and then keep with the pattern.

Grainline Studios downloadable pattern cards

In that same post, she also links to where she describes her organization scheme - printed patterns hung from hooks on a rolling rack (she's a pattern designer after all) and electronically on Dropbox with annotations on uPad (an app for iPads).

Edited to add: I just remembered that Sinclair Patterns come with a sheet like this for each pattern. Maybe other companies do that, too?