Wednesday, August 3, 2011

In My Thinking Spot. . .

My feeble attempt to organize and clean the sewing room continues, mostly in my thinking spot.  One of my biggest bug-a-boos are the shelves of quilting magazines.  I have magazines in huge notebooks, magazine holders and just lying around everywhere.  So here's my questions:
l.  How many magazines do you subscribe to?

2.  How do you decide which magazines you will subscribe to?

3.  Do you keep all the magazines, or weed out the projects you like?

4.  If you clip and toss, how to you store the cut-out projects?

5.  How would you divide and label these future projects?

I discovered that I still have a filing cabinet from when I had my business, and it's crying to be reused.  If I weed out my magazines, and file my pattern books, I can free up 4 shelves.  Four big shelves!  In a small sewing room, that's a BIG savings.  Rod has told me he will make a platform on casters on which to put the cabinet  and that will make it moveable.  I have a black hole hidden corner where I store our luggage, my sewing machine trolley, and some other cases full of "only God knows what".  But still I want to be able to access these, and my filing-cabinet-on-wheels will make that possible.  So, friends of mine, send in those suggestions,  puleese.

3 comments:

Nancy said...

sorry can't help with the magazines. I dropped all my subscriptions and mostly find my quilt patterns and inspiration on the internet...there is so much free stuff even on the magazine sites that I feel I don't need the magazines..

Pat said...

Okay...I had way too many "saved" magazines and only recently have begun doing what my friend has done with hers. I try to take 6 magazines at one sitting (you can vary that number). I go through them and tear out just the things I think I would make someday (or techniques that I want to try). I use small sticky notes to put a category on each one. (I happen to have 5 categories that appeal to me.....techniques, borders as I get tired of plain borders on quilts so I keep ones that look interesting, holidays, quilts, and miscellaneous projects that is everything that is not a quilt but that I like....bags, pin cusions, etc.). After a label with one of those categories is on each tear-out, I put each one in a pile and they stay there until I've gone through those 6 magazines. I try to be realistic and only tear out what I really will most likely use. Then...I've invested in lots of those clear plastic sleeves with holes in them that can be put in looseleaf binders. I put each project in a plastic sleeve (sometimes two if they are single pages and the same category....and I then face the front of each one out so I can readily see it through the plastic sleeve). I then put them all in a big notebook, BUT....I think I may transfer them to folders and use a filing cabinet someday. I find if I just take 6 magazines at one sitting, it doensn't become too unwieldy. As for subscriptions, I am now down to Quick Quilts (since I had projects in them last February) and American Patchwork and Quilting which was a gift subscription from a friend. BUT...I used to subscribe to more. Now I try not to get too many as I realize I rarely did anything from them and that is why I was "in trouble" and drowning in magazines. Hopefully, that won't be the case much longer....for me OR for you!!! Good luck with your magazines!!! If I lived closer, we could do it together and chat while we did it...would make it go faster for both of us!!!

Retired Knitter said...

Well I am a knitter and at one point I got 8 magazines. I have dropped that down to 3 and will only renew 1 of those.

Getting a magazine is like getting fun mail once in awhile so I will keep one subscription for sure - even if there is a ton of free stuff out there. It is like window shopping because you see things you wouldn't necessarily search for on the web.

But when I was getting 8 magazines I had probably 4 feet of magazines built up from prior years. I finally decided that was just too much - mostly because if I was looking for a pattern I NEVER looked through all those magazines - just too time consuming.

So I started to review those magazines - each one more time. I pulled out patterns that I really liked. I put those patterns in page protectors and then put them in binders - each binder was a different topic. So if I was looking for a sock pattern to make, I would pull out my sock book and look through all the patterns that I love for socks and pick one that suits me now. It was way more efficient that looking through a ton of magazines - never knowing where a sock pattern would show up and never knowing if the next magazine had a better pattern.

And while I was reviewing the magazines for the last time, I had the fun of looking at them again - like the first time I reviewed them. But once finished, the magazine went in the trash and I had the joy of seeing my magazine stack reduce - and my pattern collection get more organized.

I assume you could use a filing system rather than a binder. I just liked flipping the pages of the binder better.