The cool weather has me dreaming of fall and the changing of closets even though true fall is a ways away yet. The crisp has rekindled my energy and am back to tackling projects with gusto and already dreaming of more.
The first demon that has emerged is the organizing demon, an old friend of mine, sometimes even my alter-ego. I love to organize things and I can get quite manic about it – sometimes much to the despair of my family. Still, whenever things get out of hand, I know that if I can just get a little more organized I can have everything under control.
Actually, as sometimes happens, organize demon, was brought out by
frustration at finding a pattern. Now, I look organized about patterns
but this is really just a front: Every time I buy a pattern, the
critical information is put in a notebook. When I was young, I traced
these onto onionskin paper and kept them in a filofax.
I still have that book. More recently, as more technology has become a part of my life, I scan the photos and make a page for the filofax on the computer.
I haven’t yet gotten a useful way to get these all on my palm, although they can reside on my portable computer. I still find it easier to flip through the book than search through the palm at least in this case, because I am not looking for a particular item usually, I want to look at pictures and see what catches my fancy.
The problem is finding the actual pattern once I have decided which one I am looking for. Last year I started putting patterns I have actually used in file jackets and storing them in file cabinets. I always intended to use this method for all the patterns but, well I get busy with other projects and it hasn’t happened yet. The patterns I haven’t used, or that I haven’t used in the past 3 years or so, are stored willy nilly in pattern boxes and file drawers and shelves, and in stacks here and there, wherever they will fit. There is no system. They are just put into whatever the box or stack du jour might be. Therefore finding a pattern can be a challenge.
Yesterday I wanted a pattern. I wanted a pattern I bought recently. I washed fabric to use with this pattern. It was not on the most recent pattern stack. Hysteria mounted. My inner two-year-old was released and I dumped all my patterns out on the floor. Did this help me find the pattern? No. Did this help me feel better? Immensely.
I decided that, until I get the real system together, I needed a better way. So I sorted all the patterns into piles by type of pattern such as skirt, dress, jacket, ensemble etc. and I put them back in boxes according to these new categories. Now, when I want a skirt pattern I can look through skirts. The new blouse pattern turned up by the way, somehow it had squirreled itself away in a box of Vogue designer patterns from the early 90s. I have no idea how it got there.
Here is a picture of the floor as I was near the end of the sorting processes:
Notice that a couple of pieces of fabric and some yarn jumped in to join the fun; they didn’t want to be left out.