Monday 14 May 2012

My pattern stash

Hi, my name is Megan and I'm addicted to collecting patterns.
For somebody that has made a grand total of 11 garments (including three from a single pattern and two from an online tutorial), I sure own a lot of patterns!  At last count (which I'm pretty sure is accurate) I now have 51, and a lot of these have just been given to me by my Grandma.

So, I have decided on a new project - I will not be buying any more patterns 'just to have' until I have sewn through all of the patterns that I currently possess!  Just to be clear, this excludes patterns that I need for a specific purpose (e.g. making an outfit for a particular occasion with very specific requirements, when none of the patterns I have can be used instead!)

And another exception is this wedding dress pattern, which I have for some reason - it looks like it's from some time in the mid-80s, and I have no idea why it was in Grandma's stash!  Obviously she got married long before this, and it doesn't look anything like any of my aunts' wedding dresses - so maybe it was for a friend?  Anyway, it's just an interesting example that I shall keep for the future (in my 'just in case this comes back into fashion please don't let it come back into fashion' pile) and not add to the list of patterns I must make. 

I also have a lot of children's patterns from when dad and my aunts were younger, which will be kept aside for one day in the future!

In any case, I'm working on a new sub-page for my blog, hopefully it will be on the top bar, where I will upload my pictures of the pattern covers (some of which are better quality than others, as they were mostly taken with the pattern on my bedroom floor!) and then link the photo to each blog post as it gets written.  I am still undecided about how I should group them - by decade, by pattern company, by made vs. not yet made, or another system that I haven't worked out yet - any thoughts?  At the moment they are grouped in threes in the same order as they are in the folder on my computer, i.e. alphabetically by pattern company and then numerically by their number.

Graphical breakdown of my patterns:

I don't think these numbers particularly mean a lot (aside from being interesting), considering a lot of my patterns were given to me rather than me buying them myself.  However it's made me realise that I have a lot more modern patterns than I thought - over half of my current collection!  This is a bit unexpected for me, because I thought I'd been given far more patterns than I already have, but apparently my gradual buying of patterns 2 and 3 at a time adds up...

Anyway, I hope somebody aside from myself finds this project interesting, and I'm looking forward to sewing my way through a bunch of new-to-me patterns and hopefully filling up my wardrobe!

2 comments:

  1. Ooooh, I love graphs and statistics! But wow, I'm feeling a little embarassed about the state of my pattern collection. I have well over 150, probably 40% are modern (I bought big groups of vintage patterns). That's not even counting Burdastyle magazine patterns or even ones I've made myself! I should really go and count out how many of those patterns I've actually used! I keep telling myself to use the patterns I have but then I keep seeing awesome new ones being printed!!

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    1. Mine's only a relatively small collection, from what I've seen of some other sewing bloggers! I know exactly what you mean about the new ones being printed - I've got my eye on the new Colette patterns, but I don't have anything in particular I want them for aside from just the fact that I would have them... In any case, it was certainly an interesting exercise, to see what I have in my collection :)

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