Stash Accounting

Maybe I am a bit over the top about accounting for my sewing costs and garment makes. Forgive me, but I find it really interesting to work out the details relating to my sewing hobby, especially in contrast to buying ready to wear clothing.

I also love, love, love making lists, and online organising. I use Trello for organising my sewing including projects, fabric and patterns. I am a huge Trello fan. I am not going to go into details about how it works, it is pretty easy, and Trello have a great intro board here.

I use it at work and for other stuff at home too. But my favourite boards are my sewing boards. I have five (Five! I thought I had about three!): one for patterns; one called inventory, which is where I keep my project list and supplies; one for kids; a quilting board; and one for completed projects.

I look at my Inventory board most often and I love re-arranging the project queue and fabric “swatches” with the drag and drop feature. I have three To-sew lists: one for others/kids/gifts/home etc. (This one doesn’t get much action). My own sewing is split into two lists: Spring/Summer and Autumn/Winter. I pull the lists to the left depending on the upcoming season and what I feel I ought to be sewing. Theoretically top left is where I should start, but it doesn’t always work out that way.

I have also recently split my fabric stash lists into S/S and A/W. The lists were getting a bit long and it is helpful to see what I have to sew with from season to season.

When I buy a fabric, or a notion, I photograph it and log the details into a new card in Trello: date, where I got it, quantity, width, price and ideally, where I have physically stored it. Once this is done, I almost never go through my stash in person. I know what I have, and what I want to do with it. Once I have used a fabric, I record the details in the Trello card, with how much is left, and a link to the blog post of what I made. If the fabric is used up, I archive the card.

Pattern cards are really useful. I photograph the front and the back of the pattern envelope. That means I can refer to the quantities needed when I am in the fabric store. When I sew with a pattern, I record the changes that I made and links to the blog posts from the finished garments. Then I read through these notes and blog posts before I use the pattern again. In theory, anyway. My patterns are divided by garment type and fabric type. Currently Dresses (woven); Dresses (stretch); Tops; Skirts; Coats/Jackets/Cardigans; and Outfits. The last are those wardrobe patterns that have a top, dress, skirt and trousers or jacket in the same pattern and I should probably duplicate them across all the other lists because I usually forget what is in them.

When I have completed something from my to-sew list, I move the card to the Complete board and link to the blog post of the finished garment. I don’t look at this list very often because my blog post contents have it covered for me.

That covers what is coming up, but something that Trello does not do is analyse my lists. To do this, I have finished a little exercise that I called Stash Accounting.

I wanted to know:

1. Quantity of projects sewn to date. Including how they divide between sewing for myself and for others
2. How much fabric have I bought?
3. How much of that have I used?
4. By inference, how much fabric is sitting around, unused?
5. What is my average cost per garment.

I didn’t have any truly nasty surprises from the results, but there were a few interesting findings:

• I have made more items for the children, than for anyone else. I have also spent vastly less on projects for them. I have made about twice as many things for them, as for me, and at 1/3 of the cost. A lot of this is because projects for them are made from cheap cotton or polycotton and a lot of those are made from leftovers from other projects. If I bought fabric for a project, I counted the whole cost of that purchase towards that project, even if there was enough left over for something else.
• In that vein, my 24 items of dolls clothing have cost me a total of £15. This gives me an average cost of 64 pence per garment!
• My gift making is woefully stingy. Only two genuine gifts in there, plus some doll clothes.
• My stashed fabric is not as bad as I thought. I have sewn with 2/3 of the value of all the fabric I have ever bought. Yes, that also means that 1/3 of my total fabric consumption is unused, but I note that the more expensive fabrics are the ones that I hold on to for longer. That means the actual quantity stashed is not too bad, but they tend to be things I feel are too nice to use (my precious!). Time to cut up some silk.
• The final, really cool, thing I learned is that I am liking my finished garments more and more recently. I gave each a rating out of 10 and then rearranged them in a list. More recent stuff is at the top of the list. Either I have not got sick of something yet, or I am actually getting better at creating things I genuinely enjoy wearing.

I also have exactly 31 finished garments that are still wearable. The same as the number of days in May. Is this a sign that I should go for a Me-Made-May challenge with no repeats? I don’t think a beach wrap is going to work terribly well in May, but I might consider giving it a shot.