Getting Organized: a needle tracker

I have had this idea on my mind for quite a while but finally got around to making it this week. PatternReview is having a month of mini contests in May & this week is sewing room accessories. It gave me the push I needed !I always find that keeping track of my needles and which I am currently using or have used but it is still good for another project -- all that -- confuses me. So when I first saw this project online I thought it was next to brilliant. 

This is actually a fairly easy project, based on this genius tutorial by Portia Lawrie at the Makery. I changed it just a bit. 

For my version I used a fat quarter of Japanese cotton as my backing, just folding it in half to get the size I wanted ( the fatter rather than skinny fold). I fused on some medium weight interfacing to one half of it to give it a bit more body, and then stitched around the outer edges and turned it right side out. After pressing it again I topstitched the edges, closing up the turning gap that way.

I cut 4 strips of cream felt at 1.5" to make the needle pockets, dividing them into 4 sections with stitching. I added one 1.75" strip of grey felt at the bottom and made 3 pockets in it. 

The grey section is for the packet that I am currently using, and since I have 3 machines I made 3 pockets. I am going to add an initial to each one to help differentiate between my Janome, Kenmore, & Featherweight.

The cream pockets are for all the needle packets that I have or am likely to use soon. As I use one, the little container goes down into the grey section, and when I am done, the container goes back up into a cream storage pocket and if the needle is still usable it gets stuck into the front of the appropriate needle pocket for later use.

I think this system will help me keep much better track of my machine needles without having to resort to a magnifying glass to see the marks on a needle.

Do you have a good system for this? I have always found organization difficult so am glad to find something that feels easy to manage!

Handmade Wardrobe Planning

I was recently offered a look at the ebook  hWardrobe: Designing Your Handmade Wardrobe in a Creative, Fashionable and Sustainable Way, by Valeria Speck, of  hWardrobe.com

photo via hwardrobe.com

It's an ebook put together to help you plan out what to make, how to organize your sewing queue, identify your best silhouettes, colours etc. -- all the things I'm not very good at. I'm usually more of a slapdash, mood-based sewist (kind of like how I read, as well).

I've tried to follow along with the Colette Patterns Wardrobe Architect series in the past, but that kind of lengthy introspection and weekly assignment structure just doesn't work for me -- I dropped out a couple of weeks in, both times I tried it.

So this book held out some promise for me. I can work through it all at once and then again at my own pace. It efficiently lays out some of the same principles but not as exhaustively - for me, that's a bonus.

And there are illustrations and worksheets, along with encouraging commentary. She talks about the body being the key to the wardrobe, and working everything else around your shape and what suits you. It starts by leading you through the process of measuring and drawing your own shape for a personal croquis, in order to be able to create style that suits you from the start. The tone throughout the whole book is very accepting and welcoming of our own idiosyncrasies.

photo via hwardrobe.com

Valeria is from Russia, and it sometimes shows in her choice of words or phrases. I thought it added charm to the book and reinforced the idea that all of us sewists, wherever we are, are on the same page...quite literally here. I also liked how she added a couple of of her wardrobe drawings alongside a photo of the finished piece: it shows how the practice of sketching out our projected makes can really be useful in finding just the right pattern & fabric for a great result.

I have already started looking at some of my stash with a keener eye after reading through this book once. And I plan to work through all of the suggested Q&A and activities, to give myself a kind of structure that I can live with in my sewing room. While I don't like the detailed to-do lists and project flow charts and super-organized plans which some sewists thrive on, I do need a better level of organization. This should help me get started working a little bit more logically and thus -- hopefully -- using my stash better!

You can purchase a copy of this ebook here if you are interested; I am not an affiliate & make nothing from this. I just wanted to share as I found that this book was better suited to my sewing style than many of the other systems I've tried before and think it is an interesting & useful read!