Wednesday 25 January 2012

Recording of patterns and fabric

I have been reading many blogs on organisation. Organising fabric, accessories, patterns etc and I came across a blog "SewphisticatedLady" and she has a MAGNIFICENT system for recording patterns and fabric in a database. It is using One Note which I already had installed with Microsoft Office 10.

Now - for a living I teach adults how to use Microsoft Word, Excel. PowerPoint, Publisher and Access (in addition to other business subjects) and I had never ventured into One Note. I had a 5 min play when I first got it but wasn't inspired to learn more.

Now I have been playing for a couple of hours now AND LOVE IT! Thank you Dorothy AKA Sewphisticated Lady!! Here are some shots of what I have done:


 You can see my categories up the top and the 2 files I have on the left (Patterns and fabric). Down the Right are all the pages I have added under wardrobe category.

It is so easy. You go the website - in the above case Butterick, click on your pattern and then when it opens right mouse click and choose - send to One Note


It will the open a new page and name the page. I renamed the pages to what I wanted and you need to "clean up" by deleting the stuff that comes over with it (the rest of the website page) and then that is it! Very fast - very easy.

You can see in the next page I have even added the fabric from my stash that I want to use for the pattern.


And in my fabric file I have the information of when I purchased it and for how much etc. And I add a pattern if I have one in mind:



I am loving this system - isn't it great we can learn from each other and get hints and tips to help us?

5 comments:

  1. What do you do with out of print patterns? Just wondering. :)

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  2. Hi Alison,

    I haven't come across that yet as I have just started on this. I would think that you could either scan in or google and find something. I think that most systems would need a lot of input from the user where this would only need input for OOP patterns and the rest would be easy. I have found that some of my OOPs have been on the website of the pattern company and the rest would have be be manually entered. :-(

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  3. Interesting. A lot of my patterns date back to the 80s so wouldn't appear anywhere on the net. And, of course, I *have* to catalogue them! Even some from the early 2000s don't appear anywhere.

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  4. You can type straight into the system. Not as quick and easy as right mouse clicking but if you are cataloguing them somewhere I recommend this system. It came with my Microsoft office suite so I already have it. I am sure that if you don't have it you can probably download a trial version to try out if you are interested (or maybe a friend has it).

    If you have a scanner you can scan a picture to your PC of your pattern front and back. If not you can type it in.

    If you have an iPhone you can download the OneNote app and it syncs to your computer. I am just about to blog about it... I have been playing today!

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  5. Just wanted to leave you a thank you for your great instructions on using one-note to catalog patterns. I had been using pattern file. I don't know what the mobile app will look like. But I like this much better. So off I go to catalog all my patterns. Then I'll start scanning some of the older ones.

    Again a big thank you!

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