Thinking inside the box

A few weeks ago I decided enough was enough. It wasn’t good enough to have patterns all over the place – some in boxes in the sewing room, others in a basket in the spare bedroom and some in drawers. Whenever someone wanted a pattern they had to look in every spot (assuming they could remember all of them). If you asked my mum, she would tell you that the patterns were divided between her patterns and my patterns but if you asked me I would say the split was between ‘real clothes’ and costumes.  These two divisions almost matched but differed enough to make everything hard to find.

I googled how other people stored their patterns and found that some people have not very many patterns and other people have patterns that are all the same size, and some people have more dedication than I do, either to organisation or interior design. I decided new furniture was not an option but that a labelled set of boxes had potential.

I looked briefly at buying boxes but they were mostly outside my budget and didn’t come in useful sizes. The plastic boxes didn’t even have straight sides – not so great for storing envelopes, which do.

Copier paper boxes proved to be the right size. They were easy to accumulate as our various workplaces go through lots of paper and have no use for the boxes. However, these boxes are ugly and the different brands don't match. I’ve seen some people online who make lovely decorative storage items and I was briefly tempted to try something similar. But I decided this would slow down the organisation process considerably – I was already fed up with the state of things – and that I am not crafty or neat enough to produce something I would be happy with. So I decided to cover the boxes with black contact which would be easy to do and wouldn’t visually clutter the room. Of course Kmart ran out of black contact before I had enough boxes covered ...

The next step was working out how to divide the patterns. There are so many options: type of garment, type of wearer and ‘genre’.  And each division should be near, but not quite the capacity of one box. To solve this problem I sorted the patterns on a grid:

x-Axis: Men’s clothes, children’s clothes, complete outfits, outerwear, dresses, skirts & pants,  tops, accessories

y-Axis: Normal clothes, ‘real clothes’ (which would be costumes to anyone else), fantasy costumes, historical costumes

The final categories are:

• Women’s Tops, Bottoms and Two-Piece outfits
• Women’s Dresses, Vests and Outerwear
• Women’s Fantasy Costumes
• Women’s Historical Dresses and Outfits
• Women’s Historical Underpinnings, Outerwear and Accessories
• Men’s Fantasy and Historical Costumes
• Children’s Real Clothes
• Children’s Fantasy and Historical Costumes

The boxes are the right size to have standard pattern envelopes neatly in a row down one side while the large envelopes and zip-lock bags can lie along the other side.

I don’t have a box for the historical costumes yet and I suspect they will need a different type of box, given that the patterns are much bigger and bulkier than any of the others.

This project is part of a larger effort to neaten the sewing room (and the spare bedroom that it frequently spills into). Most of the flat surfaces are done, just under the table and the sewing machine cabinets to go. Since we now have two new sewing machines, the cabinets are undergoing major rearrangement – and changing hands.  

The room is so much nicer without large plastic containers lying around and cluttering the floor. And last week, when I needed a certain kind of bodice pattern I knew exactly where to look for it. So I am declaring this organisation scheme a success.