Yesterday I found myself staring at the Brumby skirt from Megan Nielsen and my finger was hovering above the “Buy” button. Something made me hesitate. Don’t I already have loads of skirt patterns? I realised that one of the downfalls of buying PDF patterns online is that I don’t have a good system in place to organise them. Instant gratification is all well and good, but what’s the point if you can’t remember what you actually have? I have some in a folder on my laptop; some stored in Dropbox; some as attachments in GMail; and some saved in Google Drive. I decided to try out Pinterest for organising them. Behold my sewing pattern collection!

Holy crap. There are 70 pins in there! These are the standalone patterns, either PDF or printed. Most are purchased, but a few were free downloads from various blogs and sites. Prior to this I hadn’t really played around with Pinterest much–realising that it could represent a major time-suck–but the visual aspect of this project made it seem like a good fit. Adding all my patterns went quickly using the browser extension and the iPhone app. Pinterest experts, I’ve got a couple questions for you:

• I can’t see a way to tag pins. That would be really helpful, to be able to mark them as “skirt” or “pants” or whatever. Can you do that?
• There doesn’t seem to be any way to change the default view. The “masonry” grid view is lovely, but I’d love the option to switch to a list with thumbnails (so I could see more on a page). Is that possible?

Maybe I’m trying to use the wrong tool for the job. Is there anything better than Pinterest for this? Pinboard has nice tagging, but it’s completely text-based (and I think for sewing projects, an image really helps). Delicious–which I didn’t realise was still around!–seems like it might fit the bill. Maybe I’ll try that out as well and compare…