Sunday, May 1, 2011

Organizing your patterns

I'm curious to know how some of you organize your patterns. For me, I've been drawing each pattern onto an ATC to make it easier to handle them one at a time, and to mix and match and see how things might just look if I use these two patterns together. But now I'm getting up to enough patterns on cards that I need to divide them into "classes", with each class stored in its own trading card deck box (I use the ones for baseball cards). So far, I've got them separated into "official patterns", "grids" (so anything that makes a regular grid-like pattern), and "motifs" (like most of the flower patterns, or the more 'organic' designs that don't rely on the square or triangular grid for their placement). The next branching I'll need to do will be to "bands and borders".

Mafê Mavromati over on Tangle Brasil has posted a printable version of her Great Mosaic of Tangle Patterns. The portable, printable version is a fantastic reference and a great complement to Linda Farmer's TanglePatterns.com

For those patterns that I have saved from people who have shared them, I print a copy out that I carry with me until I have made the card for that pattern. Then the steps get filed away for future reference (since the steps aren't on the pattern cards for me)

In addition, I have Sandy Bartholomew's Totally Tangled, Yoga for your Brain, and Alpha Tangle books and I enjoy flipping through those for inspiration as well.

So, how do you organize your gallery of patterns?

4 comments:

  1. Organize?....what a great idea! *G*

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  2. *laughs* Yes, organize. Sometimes I think I have as much fun organizing my supplies as I do using them.

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  3. I was having a little trouble keeping up with all of them, so what I do is to copy those I see on the internet, print and then put into a three ring binder, alphabetically. This helps me a little to use them. As I use them, I am finding I don't have to look at them each time!!!!

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  4. I have a binder too, but it's getting huge! I also put all the tangles in a photo album on my iPod Touch so I always have them with me. One of these days, I'm going to draw each one myself in sketchbooks for reference.

    There's a great post over at tanglepatterns.com.
    Lot of good ideas in the post and in the comments.

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