Scary organizing…

One of the seminars I attended at the American Sewing Guild Conference in LA in August had nothing to do with the art of sewing, rather it had to do with organizing and Photoshop.  Because the class was so unusual, I figured what the heck.  The class was taught by two incredibly enthusiastic women, Pixeladies, who have this terrific comedy routine and use it to help students understand technology.  They teach online classes so check them out, especially for designing fabric in Photoshop.

Anyway, the point of the seminar, was to show a way to easily organize your sewing patterns.  For anyone who sews, and who has been sewing for quite awhile, this is truly an issue.  I have probably 500 patterns lurking in all kinds of places in my studio, and absolutely no sense of organization to any of them, and this has come to haunt me in the last month or two when on more than one occasion a student has needed me to reference a pattern I used maybe 6 years ago, to help answer a construction question.  I was able to locate one of the patterns, but I’ve yet to locate the second.

This whole organizing thing involves Photoshop Elements’ Organizer, which comes with the Elements package, about $80, and it is a helpful tool to keep your photos organized.  I haven’t bothered, because I have about 30,000 photos, and wouldn’t even know where to begin.  Oddly enough the loose system I have for keeping track of my photos works for me because I can usually locate a photo within about 15 minutes which is pretty decent considering they can be in about 6 different hard drive locations.  Course there is the possibility the image I’m looking for is still in slide form and I have about 20 binders full of them as well.

Anyway, back to the pattern situation.  It takes about 15 seconds to scan a pattern into the computer.  The Pixeladies used their digital camera, but I found just laying them on the scanner worked better for me.  Course I actually have a scanner.  And I don’t actually like the Elements organizer, I prefer to work with Adobe Bridge which is the organizer that comes with the CS4 Creative Suite including the full version of Photoshop.  The whole point here is that once a pattern is scanned in, I can rename it with the company and pattern number like V1234 for Vogue, and it will automatically sort by pattern company, and then I can assign keywords, like what shelf or box the pattern lives in, and what’s actually in the pattern, like, jacket/skirt/pants.  You can add as many keywords as you want in any category you want, and it took about five minutes of the class to realize how valuable this is.

I’ve finally had an opportunity to actually try it out, and I’ve scanned a couple hundred patterns so far and I have to say I’m pretty embarrassed, I had no idea how many I owned, where half of them came from, how many I’ve never actually sewn, and what my garment tastes were back in the 1980’s.  Some of these patterns are pretty scary.  This is a perfect thing to do on another rainy day in the northeast, I know the western part of the state is already experiencing more flooding, I fear NJ will eventually be underwater and the Poconos in eastern PA will be beach front property…

Speaking of organizing, I nearly wet myself from laughing so hard when I came across this article in Real Simple magazine.  Real Simple is probably the only non textile magazine I subscribe to other than Time or Newsweek, largely because I am inspired by the food.  The article is called Micro Organizing, and there are a number of “I Spy” like photos that show junk drawers that have been converted to organized little compartments.  They all look wonderful in the photos, but realistically, the time spent on this kind of task would be disproportionate to how long the contents would stay in that state, at least in this household.

The image though, that caused such apoplexy, was this one.  Specifically the bottom shelf, where resides the complete collection of this particular writer’s craft/fabric stash.  Enough said.