Organizing the Charts

I’ve made good progress on re-organizing the linen. I started the memorial project for my dad on May 1 and haven’t done much of anything stitch related except work on that. Not complaining – I’ll be so happy to have it done and on a wall soon.

My initial plan several years ago was to put the charts in project bags. I use these “project bags” from Amazon. I put a sheet of blue paper in the front of a bag, and with a Sharpie, wrote a big 1 on it so I could see it through the bag. I filled it with charts and on a spreadsheet, I put the name of every start that was in that bag, as well as the designer and stitch count so I could sort by name of chart or designer. Then I filled bag #2 and so on. I would put as many bags as I could fit into a storage bin and label the front of the bin 1 – 8 or however many bags I could get in there. The problem with this idea is that I would sometimes take charts out to decide what I wanted to start next, or to show to a friend. Then when it was time to put them away, I had to go back to the spreadsheet to see which bin they went into and that didn’t always happen so after a few years, I ended up with a system that almost worked.

The other day I was watching a floss tube and there’s a SAL starting June 1 and most everyone seems to be stitching Plum Street project. I went to my spreadsheet, searched by Plum Street and I think I probably have more Plum Street projects than anything else but they are spread out across MANY bags. I thought . . what if I sort my charts by designer? Then when I need a Plum Street project, I can pull one bag and have them all!

I got started and made some good progress yesterday sorting and organizing charts. I think I’ll like this newer system better. For today and tomorrow, I’m back to stitching . . next week maybe I’ll finish sorting these charts!