Lisa talks about fabric swatching. She loves the archival properties of those tiny snips of cloth. It is like having a library of your fabric collection. Lisa shares a few ways that she's seen other sewists use swatches and the preservation of those tiny gems. She then dives into an explanation of her system. PATREON ALERT: Patreon subscribers get access to the swatch cards Lisa designed to organize her fabric collection. Formats .doc and .pdf.
Products mentioned
Paper Trimmer-- I have two: one with guillotine for big projects. And a small one for quick cuts.
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Swatching Your Fabric
Lisa Woolfork 0:15
Hello Stitchers. Welcome to Stitch Please, the official podcast of Black Women Stitch, the sewing group where Black lives matter. I'm your host, Lisa Woolfork. I'm a fourth generation sewing enthusiast with more than 20 years of sewing experience. I am looking forward to today's conversation. So sit back, relax, and get ready to get your stitch together.
Hello Stitchers and welcome to the Stitch Please Podcast. I'm your host, Lisa Woolfork. And we're talking today about swatches and swatching and swatch cards. This episode has a special Patreon bonus. If you are a Patreon subscriber, you will receive a file that has the swatch card template that I use to swatch my fabric. And I will be talking about these cards in great detail. And as well if you're not a Patreon subscriber, I'll tell you how I did it. It's just that if you're a Patreon subscriber, you have this already pre-done for you since this is what I use all the time.
So to begin, let's define what a swatch is. A swatch is simply a sample of a fabric. You purchase a fabric, it comes into your collection, you take a snippet of it, usually I get mine from the top left corner near the salvage but not including the salvage, because I want it to be a very stable piece. Also, if you have already made something, you can swatch it from any scraps or leftover. But I like to begin in a sewing project with a swatch of fabric. Now the swatches of fabric can be used for a variety of purposes. Primarily, it's a reference, it's a reference. And so for me, I'll have a fabric swatch, and if I need to refer to the colors, in order to create coordinating looks, to buy coordinating fabrics, to pick out thread. All of these are ways to use the fabric swatch. Similarly, I've seen people who are building like a fall wardrobe, take samples of their fabric and lay it out on a sheet of paper or in a notebook or something or on Trello or some digital medium, and use that to see if the look works together. These are the colors that we're working with this season. And so a swatch book, a reference book is really important for that. And so I wanted to talk about how you would build that on your own. So today's episode is going to be talking about what, why, how and when to use swatches and your swatch cards. I call them swatch cards because cards are what I use. I've seen other folks use spiral bound notebook, stitched bound notebooks, Trello, Air Table, other digital planners. But for me, I like the swatches because I like having the tactile feel of the fabric near me in this great archive of a library that I've created over the years. And so I would love to help you get started with that too. Or just to figure out if this kind of thing is right for you. I enjoy keeping swatch cards because I like having a record of what I've purchased, and in some cases, hopefully many cases, records of what I actually made with these fabrics. And so it's a really useful tool for me to keep track of what I have to help me understand what my buying habits are. It helps me to avoid duplicates. These are some of the reasons why I use my swatch cards. And that's to plan for projects to keep track of what I've purchased and to build an archive. It also makes it easier when I buy a pattern I can look at the pattern requirement like how much fabric does it require. Then I could just go over to my swatch cards, find a fabric that I think I might like, just flip through the catalog, and I find the fabric and I'm like, Oh, this is how much I have. So this will be fine. So I don't have to measure it out every time. I know how much I have because I've written it down. I've talked a bit about what a swatch card is and why I use it, let's get into some details about how I build my cards. I will talk about the materials and supplies that you need to build them as well as the information that you put onto the cards themselves. For me, a good swatch card begins with paper. Paper is essential for my system. I know other folks prefer digital systems and there are ways to do it that way. I prefer paper. I am such an old school nerd. I just love paper. I love stickers, I love, I don't know if I will say I love washi tape, but I like stationery. So for me, a swatch card is a tactile experience. Not only am I putting a swatch of fabric on this card, the card itself looks good, it's sturdy, it's reliable, it's not going to just crumple up and then the way that I store them, they also stay in good condition.
Here are the supplies that I use to build my swatch cards. First, I use an Avery label. And I know that there's certain generic properties of the labels, but the ones that I use are Avery number 5264. Now you don't have to write all this down because I'll put all this stuff in the show notes. Avery 5264. It's just a shipping label, but it allows you to put six card templates on one sheet of paper. And that's the reason I like this Avery template 5264. And this is for inkjet. Another thing that I use as an important part of my swatch card process is premium photo paper. I like glossy paper. This is called a brilliant gloss. I first purchased it years ago at Sam's Club. I've found it since at Costco, I found it on Amazon, and a few other places you can even buy it directly from the manufacturer. But feel free to use whatever paper, whatever photo paper that you like. And whatever paper is going to work again for your system. If you are going to have the card standing on their own, which is what I do, I have my cards bound in rings. So each of my fabric drawers, and there's 24 of them, each of them has a ring, that index is whatever is in the drawer. So if I want to go to a drawer, say A7, I pull out the drawer, look at it. And actually I don't even have to pull out the drawer. I pull out the ring of swatch cards that has everything in that drawer indexed. So rather than even having to look through the drawers for fabric, I can just pick up the ring and flip through that. And because I want to flip through it and use it regularly, it has to be sturdy and reliable, and this paper really helps with that. Some other supplies you'll need if you want to use it the way that I use mine is a paper trimmer and a hole punch as well as some book rings. I have my swatch cards on a ring, like people might have a bunch of keys on a ring, and each ring corresponds to a drawer. But you don't have to be this elaborate with the system. If you choose to do this, all you really need is a space to put your swatches and a way to catalog information on them. And if you're doing it in a notebook, and you just want to add to the notebook over time, that's the way to do it. Some people also use binders for the same reason. I like the cards because they are flexible and let me carry them easily to different places. In addition, when I'm finished with the fabric, after I've sewn it all up, I have a box where all of the retired fabric lives. And so that's also a nice collection of swatches from the past that I can go back and revisit projects if needed, or if I want to. So here's the technical information or the technical process that I use to create these swatch cards. Again, if you're a Patreon subscriber, you will just get these sent to you, and you can modify the template as needed. But I'm going to explain the process for people who are not Patreon subscribers, just so that you'll know how I did it. I started with as I said the Avery label. And you'll need to understand that your photo paper and your label paper will be working together. You will eventually be peeling your labels on to the non glossy side of your photo paper. I like photo paper too, because in addition to being sturdy and shiny, you can put some really beautiful digital paper on it to print it out and have some really nice designs. You can customize it. You can do all sorts of things with this photo paper for other projects, but it looks really good for your swatch cards for them to be cute and glossy, as well as really sturdy. Now you're ready. You've got your photo paper, you've got your Avery labels 5264. Again, you don't have to write all this down. I am going to put it in the show notes. You've got your sticky paper and your photo paper. Your next step is to sit down at your laptop or wherever you do your computing and pull up Microsoft Word. I use Microsoft Word. I'm not sure if you can do the same things in Google Docs. You probably can, but I don't know how to do that so I’m just gonna explain how I do it in Microsoft Word. But if you don't have Microsoft Word, it's also important to note that Avery has a website that has templates that you can download and customize, not just from Microsoft Word, but you can work right in their software program that they have online, and you can design things there. So if you want to design your own and you don't have Microsoft Word, you still have access to customizing cards.
In Microsoft Word, open a new document and go to “Mailings”. And under “Mailings”, they have templates. And they have lots of different companies that make labels, you go under templates, and you look for labels. And once you identify the label that you need, they're going to put in the number (5264), you find that label and call it up and create new document. This will give you a Microsoft Word document that is perfectly formatted to the size of these six labels on one 8.5 x 11” sheet of paper. Now you're looking at this document, it's six blank squares on paper that's oriented probably north to south with the 8.5 by 11 inch at the top. What you want to do is to flip it sideways. You want to make that portrait view into landscape view. So that now your 11 inch edge is at the top of the sheet. I like to start in the upper left hand corner and create two text boxes, one text box at the top of that first label, you only want to work at one label at a time. The top label in the upper left corner, make two text boxes do that by going to “Draw Text Box.” You draw one text box that's about maybe one inch square, mine might be one and a half inch square. And then you draw another text box that's much bigger, and you can set this to fit within the boundaries of the label. So my text box that I've drawn, the second one is 2 ¾ inches by 2.75 inches. So what you're looking at then is your screen, you're looking at your label template that is now in landscape mode, you're going to the upper left side of the document and putting in two text boxes, a small one, that's about 1.5 inch square and a large one, that's about 3 inches by 2.5 inches. That is your beginning. Now, inside each text box, you're going to write (surprise!) some text. For your top box, you're going to write in “Paste Swatch Here”. And this might seem silly to tell yourself that this is what you're going to do, but it's a nice reminder and it's just good practice. And if you're having someone else help you then that's good instruction. For the larger box, this is where all the essential information that I need from my projects goes. I always like to ask myself, if I'm going to buy a piece of fabric, what am I going to do with it? And have you ever looked at your fabric collection? And look through your stash and flip through a drawer or a closet and been like, Oh gosh, what was I thinking? What was that for? Now, if you have swatch cards, you know exactly what it's for. Because when you bought it, you wrote down some ideas about what your plans were. And so that was my intention behind adding this information to my cards. So my large box that has all the content for the swatch above it, has the following information, I write the word “Yards”, and then I put four blank dots or four blank dashes next to the word “yards”. And the reason I do that is because if I start with a certain yardage, say I bought six yards, I will probably not use all six yards at one time. I might use four, and then it's nice to know, okay, like I had six, I'll scratch out six. Now I've used four, that means I have to and that way you're watching the fabric be used. And that number of the original purchase will gradually go down. And that's just again, a nice way to keep track of your inventory. In addition, beneath the word “yards”, I have the width. So it's a checkbox. Is it 45 inches wide, or is it 60 inches wide, or is it other? And then I'll say no, it's 57. So you want to be careful because the salvage is extra wide and you can't use that. Below that I put “Project Ideas”. And that's something that I added later on to the swatch collection because I wanted to avoid that confusion. Like why did I buy this? What on earth was I thinking? And so the way that I divided it up was if I was sewing for my husband or my kids, so I have a line there that says “Ben or boy's shirts, pants, underpants,” because I make a lot of underpants shirts and pants for them. Mostly shirts and underpants, a lot of those. And so is that what this is for? Is it for a jacket is it for something else? But I had their projects, the stuff for my husband and kids were on a separate line. Then beneath that I have “dress, blouse, underpants / exercis,” because that's one category of sewing for me. And then the other one I have beneath it is “skirt / pants or other”. Because again, if I'm not writing a contract with myself, it's not written in stone, but I just wanted to have some idea about why I chose this fabric. And then after I've listed the project ideas, I also have a section called “Notes”. Now, let me tell you about these notes. The notes have been very helpful to me. And they've also been maybe not a warning, but kind of like a like a self check like, girl really knew what are you doing. So under the “Notes”, I've written things like pattern numbers. So if I want to make a dress and underpants, I'm going to use pattern number 7833 or pattern number 8023. These are the things I think I want to make, and so I write those down as notes. But in addition, something I started to do is to write the date of when I bought the fabric, where I bought it from and how much it was. That part has been quite interesting to go back and look at and to see how much I spent for this fabric when I purchased it, and have I even made it up yet. I'll pull out a project and I'll say, Okay, wow, I got 6.5 yards of this fabric. This is great, I'm going to make a caftan with it...Oh, wait, I bought this back in when? So it's just a reminder, me to just to pay attention. It's just a, for I guess you could imagine, so it's a form of mindfulness, at least it is for me. And I find it really relaxing to clip through the cards and see the things that I have, as well as very convenient to do that when I know exactly how much I need, and I can look at a swatch card and not have to pull out the fabric and measure it and fold it and put it back. I can just look at the card and I’ll know if I'm prepared.
You're listening to the Stitch Please podcast, and we are talking today about swatching and swatch cards. When we come back, we'll talk more about how to cut your cards out, and when they become really useful. Stay tuned.
Lisa Woolfork 17:47
The Stitch Please podcast is really growing. I want to thank you for listening to the podcast and ask a favor. If you are listening to this podcast on a medium that allows you to rate it or review it. For example, Apple Podcasts or iTunes. Please do so if you're enjoying the podcast, if you could drop me a five star rating, if you have something to say about the podcast, and you wanted to include that a couple sentences in the review box of Apple makes a really big difference in how the podcast is evaluated by Apple, how it becomes more visible. It really is a way to glean into the algorithm that helps to rank podcasts. So if you had time to do that, to drop a little line in the review feature of the podcast, that would be really appreciated. It would help us to grow even further and faster.
And we’re back! Thanks so much for listening to the Stitch Please podcast. I'm Lisa Woolfork, your host, and we are talking about swatch and swatch cards. So in the previous segment, we talked about where to get the materials you need for your swatch cards, what materials you need. We've sat down at the computer, we have opened up the template for this particular size of labels that are going to go on top of our photo paper. We have put in the information, we have two text boxes: a small one at the top for the swatch piece, and a much larger box that we then insert a text that has information about fabric yardage, the width of the fabric, project ideas and notes. So again, this is something that you'll want to customize. You want to decide what's useful for your sewing practice, for your sewing life. If you know that you sew lots of dresses and blouses, then you can say I'll put this down as a category for my swatch card because I know it's going to come up again and again or that I buy a lot of fabric for this particular garment. You want the card to have information that is useful for you and your sewing. That way you'll use it. If it's something that is not relevant to your life, and you're not going to use it, don't put that information on there because it's not going to be helpful to you. So you've made your card and your upper left corner, you group it together, then copy and paste those text boxes in the remaining five squares of your label paper. And now you have a full sheet of labels that will print out. So we have all the relevant information that we need on the cards. What's the next step? The next step is to print them. And one of the reasons I like this particular Avery label is that it has this textured border that helps the pages not to stick to each other, and it helps it to feed evenly into the printer. So you feed it through your printer, it prints out and now you're looking at six wonderful, beautiful labels ready to be attached to your photo paper. Because I know that all six labels fit on one sheet of paper, that gives me confidence that I can cut this paper with my paper cutter into six even pieces. That's why it's important to measure 4.5 inches tall, and the cross with from my other piece is like 3.5 or no less than that, like 3 ⅜. And that kind of precision is important for this process because if you cut one too big, one will be too small. So you just want to figure out how you want to transfer the lines or just wing it. I tend just to wing it, and I know if I'm cutting it into six even pieces, the sticker will fit. And that's all you need is the sticker to fit. So cut in half the long way first, so I know I have to even pieces, and then I cut the crossways, doing your best to make sure that you are cutting them evenly. After I've cut them evenly, I peel off the stickers from the sheet and stick them onto my freshly cut cards. And after that, I put a hole in the upper left because I keep mine on a ring. I used to put these circles that are shaped like donuts. And they are meant to reinforce punched holes in notebook paper. I used to use those, but now that I switched to a good photo paper, I don't need it. Now you have some beautiful cards, you've got a stack of cards, at least you've got six, and you could always do more. Mine, on the back, have this pretty image of sewing patterns and dresses and scissors, but you can customize whatever whatever you want. You could make a digital paper of your own face. I guess I should maybe show you how to do that if people are interested. But you could do all sorts of stuff with this paper. You want to make it fun and beautiful. You want to decorate this in whatever way that will make you pick up the cards and use them. If you don't need them to be pretty, if you don't need them to have digital backgrounds or whatever, that's also fine. Whatever it takes for you to use it is what's the right thing for you to do. Now you've got this wonderful stack of cards, what do you do next? When do you use them? We've already talked a bit about how you use them by making the fabric swatch and attaching it to the to the card and filling in the information. But when do you do this? I think that there's three distinct times that I have used them. And this is what I'm basing my recommendations on. The first thing I would say is to use them before you need them. Make them before you need them. And I love to say I'm not, I didn't originate this phrase, but I think it's true. If you stay ready, you don't have to get ready. And so for me, it's always important to have five or six, five or six swatch cards ready to go, just so when I buy fabric and it comes into the house, all I need to do is take a swatch from it right away, fill it in right away. It's really great if I order something and the invoice comes and they have included the yardage because sometimes I forget how much I ordered. They include the yardage on the invoice, so when I take out my swatch card, I can just look at the invoice and say oh, okay, I got two and a half yards of this. Alright, I'll put that there. Oh, I got four or five yards of this. I'll put that there. So it makes it easy to get the information without having to do any measurement at all. So that's one of the reason why I think it's important to have the cards ready before you need them. The second place that I've used them that's been very helpful is when I go fabric shopping. And I have done that when I'm shopping locally, or when I'm shopping for fabric when I travel. So whenever I go somewhere, I always look for the two F's: food and fabric.
I'm always like looking to Yelp to see what's the best good local spots, and where's the best fabric because I like having documentation or just souvenirs from the different places that I've gone. So it is very easy to pack a stack of swatch cards in your carry-on bag, in your purse, in your backpack. Having these swatch cards ready for a trip to the fabric store is my favorite way to use them, because I can get a swatch right there as I purchase it and I know exactly what the measurement is because it's being measured right there in front of me. And the idea about the project ideas in the notes, they're fresh in my mind, like I just picked this up cuz I think is pretty and it'll be a really nice off the shoulder elasticised blouse, or, oh, these could be some really good pants, for my husband, this could be some good shorts. Oh, look, this is a remnant piece. And I think this will be really good for underpants or for a bra. Like all of these things that I might think throughout the course of a shopping trip, but after I've paid and left the store, I have no idea like wait a minute, or if I put it down for it, and then I come back to it two weeks later, you can guarantee I have no idea why I bought it. I still think it's pretty, but I have no idea. So for me it's making, cementing my ideas as I am having it. I just grabbed it off the shelf, I just took it to the cutting counter, Hey, when you cut that, can you cut me a little swatch? Oh, no, you can't Okay, give me a scissors real quick. Or they cut the yardage and I have my own scissors and I cut my own swatches after I have chosen to have the fabric cut. Now I know sometimes like when I ended up another place that I love to do this is when I go to New York, because there's just so many great fabric places there. And something that you'll see because because I guess they have so many fashion students there will be signs in the fabric stores that say “no sell swatching”. And I think it's because the students come through and just take off big chunks themselves. So this is not what I'm recommending. What I have done is I go to the counter, I say I want this fabric, I am going to buy it, and I take my piece right there and staple it to my card or I use a piece of scotch tape or whatever. Because I love having my cards with me while I shop, because it just helps me to keep track and it helps me It helps keep me accountable. Okay, you have a bunch of cards at home. Are you really want to add to this collection? Yes, of course. That's okay. Sure. So that's that tends to be how my inner dialogue goes with buying fabric because yeah, just go ahead, a lot of encouragement around that. And the swatches and the swatch cards helped me manage that. Then finally, when you think about when and how to use swatch cards, is when you, I think the most difficult and time consuming way to do it, is to do it when you're facing a fabric mountain and let me explain what I mean by that. You can probably get the visual. You have been buying fabric, you have stacks of it, you have bins of it. You have drawers full, you have closets full, you have so much of everything, that is a fabric mountain. And so I've also had excellent success with tackling the fabric mountain by having my sisters come when my sisters, I didn't have them come to visit to tackle my fabric mountain. I had them come for Christmas, because that's what you do. And so they came for, I think it was Christmas time. And they helped me tackle my fabric mountain. So I said, Hey, here's the cards. Here's the mountain. Can you help me measure this and just fill out the cards? I don't know if they folded they might have folded some too. But they helped me to measure it. Similarly, a few years ago, I hired a group of high school students who live in the neighborhood and are some who are just friends of my son or friends that I knew their moms or whatever, and they came and tackled the fabric mountain and it was a team lift. Let me tell you, it was a team lift. There was somebody who was inputting data into the patterns. It was somebody else who was folding, there was somebody else who was measuring there was somebody...iit was a lot of work. But at the end of it, we climbed that fabric mountain and I have the great pleasure of saying I now have this very extensive and detailed catalogue of my fabric that I can flip through and browse through like an old school card catalog. And speaking of card catalogs, that brings me to my last point about storing your cards. I store my cards in a small shelf. Each of my fabric drawers are organized by columns. I have three columns that are lettered A, B, and C. And within the column there are rows and the rows are numbered one through eight. So that's 23, no 24. That's 24 drawers of fabric, that each have a set of cards that correspond to it. So that's quite a bit of cards, because there's a lot of fabric in each drawer. And so that's why I have the, I use the hole punch in the upper left corner. So drawer C1 and drawer B7, these each have a distinct ring that says that on it. Now, I have recently been gifted a desktop old school real life card catalog. Oh my gosh, y'all, it's so beautiful. The only drawback is that it's, the card drawers are a little small for my current swatch cards. So they'll work, I just need to trim them so that they'll fit in the card catalog better. And so that's the project for another day, but it is a project that I think it will be doable and worth it to have them in this beautiful actual card catalog drawer. I'm really excited about that. Another way to keep them is in a small photo box. They sell these boxes at different craft stores. It's this very firm box with a lid, and they're narrow. And so you can put photos in there, that's what they're for, but you can also put your cards in there. Similarly, depending on if you're not going to use this particular shape that I'm describing, based on the shipping labels, you could do for example, baseball cards. Imagine you made your swatch cards the same size as baseball cards. And when you were done, you can put each card in a baseball card sleeve. They sell them that go with binders, baseball cards, YuGiOh cards, Pokemon cards, all of these cards have these specially formatted vinyl sheets to protect them. So you could always make your swatch cards the size of a baseball card or a collector's card, and then you would have a place to put them all. And that could be another method as well.
So we've been talking today about swatch and swatch cards. I hope this episode has been useful to you. I hope it inspires you to organize your fabric collection in a way that's useful to you. You don't have to do what I'm doing. I'm not sewing your clothes. It's like they say run your own race. You have to use this practice, if it is useful to you. It's been very useful to me, I've really enjoyed it over the years, and I do love to be able to have such quick and easy access to the fabric that I have, as well as the way that the notes section of the cards gives me a chance to commit to a project before I even start. Not all of the fabric that I chosen has notes and plans, but at least I know how much I have and that is an important start. So hopefully this will get you thinking about swatch cards if a swatch card and a swatch method, or a swatch archive is helpful to you. I hope you enjoyed this episode. We will be talking more about fabric organization and these kind of things throughout the podcast because I know organizational tips are things that people are interested in so that's what this episode is about. Thank you for listening, and we will see you next time.
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