Oh Sew Cultured: How I use Airtable to organise my sewing projects (and you can use it too!)

One morning, early in 2018, I was clearing out my junk folder when an email from Angelist caught my eye. "Excel is dead" the subject declared - you don't say something like that without getting someone like me fired up*. I took the bait and opened the email. This is how Airtable entered my life.

I love a good spreadsheet, but I really hate trying to use a spreadsheet where a database would be better suited to the job. Airtable plugs this gap, it looks like a spreadsheet but has the functionality of a database (and it looks all pretty and contemporary).

There were some examples of applications out there already, though the community is much more active by now. At the time, I enjoyed Simon Hørup Eskildsen's posts on how he uses it (Minimum Viable Airtable, How I Use Airtable) and leafing through the Airtable Universe pages to see hundreds of applications I couldn't begin to imagine. I've built some test bases with enterprise applications but we're an Office365 organisation and I have enough problems with people staggering around abusing Teams.

FYI. This system below would probably work for any situation where you need to pull together several inventories and create projects. But I've done it for sewing as that's my thing. Feel free to take these ideas and run with them.

The Organisation Problem

On a basic level, I have a pile of fabric and a pile of patterns - they should all be linked together so I know what I'm using for which project. I want to know what I already own so I don't buy duplicates and I want to know what my stock looks like so I can colour match it.

I want to be able to plan projects when I'm not in my sewing space. I want to browse my stock or find something specific without having to leaf through everything.

The Problem With Sewing Apps

For a long time I was fruitlessly looking for a digital inventory system to help with sewing. There are a lot of sewing organisers out there, but I always felt that they weren't quite right. Some were expensive and had too many features, some were free and looked pretty rubbish. Some were designed for quilters, or embroiderers or general crafters, definitely not garment sewers. Some were social. Very few of them were designed to work on more than one device (and I don't mean they lacked the ability to sync (though that is true)), meaning that they were only ever developed for iPad or android or WindowsPhone. And none of them ever contained my holy trinity of requirements for an information store: backup, restore and exportable data. Because nothing gets me down like losing my entire inventory each time I replace a device.

OH AND THE MANUAL DATA ENTRY. EURGH.
Doing it for one app is a chore. Doing it for several is just eurgh...

And I understand that a lot of these apps will have been developed by tiny teams with a passion to help out other people like them. I get that. I'm sure that so many sewing apps are imperfect home-brewed solutions, but I desperately wanted to believe there was a better way. Something customisable by the user (we do know how to do alterations after all) but where the nitty-gritty infrastructure stuff was already taken care of.

In the past I've used:

OneNote (and Evernote): For pattern storage. OneNote is like a freeform filofax or notebook. It's good for images and annotations, but not very good for cataloging. For a long time you couldn't filter or search easily (it has improved), but it is a good ground for recording ideas and making digital collages. I really appreciate that this will work (fairly) seamlessley between computers and mobile devices, and I only need to sign in to a cloud account to access the information. You don't even necessarily need OneNote installed because you can access it in the browser.
Fabric Locker: This was on iPad several years ago, it might still be there. Allows you to store fabric and patterns, then you can link entries as projects and add free text notes. Used frustratingly tiny pictures, and only 1 per entry. I gave up on this app when I lost my data a couple of times after it crashed.
Clothio: Bless Clothio. I love this little Android app. Sure, I can't extract the data or access it on anything other than my phone. Sure, it clogs up my image library by saving image duplicates and breaks a bit if I accidenally delete a fabric image stored elswhere on my phone. Sure, it won't let me edit a fabric image once it has been added. Sure, it's only a fabric library so patterns are left in the wild - but I liked it. I can search by pattern, colour, type, shop, designer...loads of different attributes which are mostly added via tickboxes. Plus, it's offline so I can look at it anytime (but mostly between tube stops when then the wifi drops).

Enter Airtable

Again, I love a good spreadsheet, but I really hate trying to use a spreadsheet where a database would be better suited to the job. Except that I only know how to use databases, not build them. I suck at building/making relationships and I certanly don't know how to get one to support images, or integrate with third parties. And I have limited time, energy and brainspace to learn how.

I don't code - but I know how to build a smashing spreadsheet.

Before I take you on a tour of my setup, I wanted to give you a bit of context on why I've arrived at this way of working. When I first started using Airtable, I had a grand idea for something that I could deploy to the community for free and that could be copied by other users. I have a very long-standing annoyance about cataloguing patterns via technology to have quick reference available - ideally with some sort of link to a database that will auto-fill all the blank spaces about sizing, style, garment type, recommended fabric, size range, rabric required etc and the images. This is normally tied to a website's functionality as a shop, mostly as a by-product of this commercial activity. I know some people have accounts on PatternReview.com that allow them to do this, that The Foldline is probably one of the best repositories of information by now (but doesn't do the community stuff in the same way), and that Kollabora has also attempted this. I guess these are the most well-known multi-brand platforms.

The stick in the mud for me has always been magazine patterns. When I was buying Burda semi-regularly, this meant ~50 new patterns I needed to catalogue and refer to. I think there is a solution floating around the Russian Burdastyle community, and some people have just stored photos of each centre-page spread of line drawings into their phones. I used OneNote to store a big reference page of all of the line drawings. I guess it's good enough, but I longed for a system where you could tell Burda you owned a particular magazine edition and it would give you access to the PDF instructions, or pieces or just save a list in your user profile. It seemed like a very small ask.

And then they launched burdastyle.co.uk

With no pattern images and missing the back catalogue

And then they revamped the UK site and the US site

Completely obliterating the back catalogue, purchase history, project history of each user.

They forced most existing users to choose between inflated pattern prices in their domestic currency or bear foreign transaction fees and exchange rates to keep using the US platform that had a record of their projects and purchases.

Because of course your logins were completely separate accounts.

And then they failed to fill in the information on the product page so you didn't know what size you were buying or if you'd ever be able to procure the materials for the make.

And they kept the legacy issues where documents were attributed to the wrong patterns, or the wrong patterns to the wrong magazines. So you could buy something, open up the PDF and discover that it was for a different garment.

Oh, and then the magazine got very lame very quickly.

So now that Burda is never getting my money again, I think my OneNote solution is fine - I just need to break all of the web links. I tried to input a couple of issues of Burda into Airtable, but it's impossible without webscraping, API or a similar tool. So now I will only add a Burda Pattern if I have taced it out already - indicating a serious intention to make it. I've just cleared out the weblinks on these records:

For other pattern brands, Airtable works okay. I still can't call on an automated way of populating the pattern information, but I can link to the webpage and I don't actually buy that many so I don't need a scalable answer. This is semi-sustainable for now. One major advantage of Airtable is that I can upload my PDF patterns and instructions. That means that (give or take) if I am planning a project away from my main pattern stash, I can print a new version of the pattern! I can carry half my pattern stash around in my pocket.

The Tour

In essence I have 3 tables within my Project Planner (Sewing) base:

Fabric - in which I log an image, characteristics, composition, measurement, brand, colours and shop of the fabric
Pattern - in which I log the name, web link, image, garment type and category of a pattern
Project - Where I select items from Fabric and Pattern to go together.

The Fabric one gets updated immediately after a purchase and it helps me remember how much I bought of a particular fabric.

I have filters for various criteria and have just sorted out a Colour field. One of the things I struggled with was entering colour information into these records. For about 18 months, I just used a free text field but it wasn't great. I was hoping for a colour picker, but it never materialised. When I started using Airtable, the multi-select option had very limited colour choices and I didn't want to be stuck with a label colour coded "Green" when the text said "Blue" - I think this has been expanded, and it currently looks like this:

The Patterns and Projects tables have some notes sections, which can be useful if I need to put reminders to myself.

I have a small "Done?" Tick box on the Project records and can use this as a rule to filter between 'To Do' list/Available fabrics and completed projects. This has been really useful over time to check back on things. When adding fabric to a project, the table uses the All Fabrics list, so I can also add a scrap to the Project without clogging up my fabric list with tiny cuts.

Desktop vs Mobile

I love being able to view and edit this on mobile and computer. Most of the fabric entries and Projects are created on my mobile - but there are some edits that are only possible on computer (removing a fabric from a project). The desktop version has different views, while mobile only really has a standard one:

On desktop, you can have a Gallery View:

And a Grid View:

The Grid View is most helpful for editing things.

It is disappointing that there's no mobile Gallery View yet, but I just discovered a "hack" via this Community thread (and when my phone prompts me how I want to open the link, I choose Airtable not browser). This is what it looks like: