I spent today cleaning my studio – again! If I plan on actually using it, then I guess it’s not realistic to expect that it will always be clean, right? After a couple of projects and then preparing for a lecture and two workshops, I could barely walk back there. So, I dedicated all of yesterday to put things away, throwing stuff out, and prewashing fabric.
I also reorganized the bookcases in my studio. I have some Qube Carts that I use when I lecture or teach a workshop, and I realized it would be nice to be able to keep certain items in them all the time so it would make advance preparations easier but, that meant I needed a place to put them. The only solution I could come up with immediately was to make room on the bookcases. See them down in the bottom right corner? Two can be left assembled and filled with workshop supplies and the third one can be folded away. I ended up storing quite a few workshop and lecture supplies on the shelves nearby, too.
As you might imagine, one thing led to another and I ended up reorgainzing other parts of the bookcases, too. How do you organize your quilt books? I ended up dividing them in two categories: inspirational (historical, quilt shows, and quilt collections) and instructional. Then I alphabetized each section by author. I’m not entirely sure I like that approach, but I’m satisfied with it for the time being. I definitely need to weed out stuff at a future date (years and years from now, no doubt). I’m thinking I should probably get rid of some of my magazines, too. Five shelves of magazines seems a bit ridiculous. (There were six before I started…)
I spent several days earlier this week playing with DD#2. She has an idea for a quilt so we’ve been painting fabric and playing with the design to see if we can come up with something interesting. Hopefully, there will be more about later.
Comments
2 responses to “Organizing quilting books”
My own “resource library” is organized by topic, not alphabetical. All of my Lone Stars are together, all of my crazy quilt books, all of my paper-piecing books, all of my Celtic quilting, all of my quilting motif books, etc, etc.
When I want to do a particular kind of quilt, I simply need to find that area along the bookshelf. ๐ It doesn’t matter to me who the author was and I probably wouldn’t remember the author if I knew, so alphabetizing by author wouldn’t be of use to me.
I do have a problem of where to put books that are multi-topical. ๐
Magazines. Oh dear, magazines. I do keep all the same publications together. They have Post-It note flags on the pages that interested me *at the time*. I really should devote some time to returning to those (older) issues to see if the flagged pages still hold my interest.
But … since magazines have many different projects, who knows if a project that doesn’t interest me today might excite me tomorrow? Crazy quilting is a case in point; I’m only now beginning to become interested in it. I can go through all my (older) magazines for Crazy quilt articles and will have a windfall. If I had thrown them away, I’d need to spend money on new resources.
So … ::sigh:: do I keep them? or toss them if they no longer have any projects that interest me *now*?? Oh, decisions, decisions!
It is wonderful, however, to have everything neat and tidy, if only for a little while. ๐
Yeah, I don’t always remember authors either. I have two shelves full of the historical and inspirational books, and four shelves of the instructional books. There’s one more shelf that has art books amd non-quilt, textile books. So it’s not too overwhelming when I need to find something specific. I’m terrible at putting things away, though!
I flag my magazines with post-it notes, too. As long as I have the room, I think I might just keep Quilt Art, American Quilter and Quilter’s Newsletter magazines and get rid of everything else. I’m getting rid of my least favorite magazines first and see how it goes.