In case I don't get around to posting this for a while: "today" is February first.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------- The first organizing tip in today's fabric.com newsletter gave me a chuckle: keep patterns in zippered food-storage bags and keep the bags in a three-ring binder.
I store my circular knitting needles that way, but I keep my patterns in an antique trunk Mom bought at an auction sale -- and I gather from posts here that I have a small and pitiful collection.
Storing works-in-progress in pizza boxes sounds like a more-useful notion -- I store my scraps and tapes in old suit boxes for the reasons given for projects -- but a glance around the sewing room shows that very few of my projects would fit into a pizza box. (I sure hope that come spring, I can find all four pieces of that linen dress I abandoned last fall.) (Ulp! Sewing-wise, it's spring. I'm still working on my wind pants.)
It's a pity that U-Line doesn't sell suit boxes. I gather that suits are shipped in oversized pizza boxes these days, and square boxes that fit my shelves would be dinky and cramped, so I continue with an untidy assortment of rectangular boxes, one of which I suspect of being older than I am.
Around here, a more-useful organizing tip would be, "When you throw a garment into the sewing room, pin on a note saying why the garment is on your mending pile" -- I wish I'd up and *do* it once in a while!
I must give fabric.com high marks on both their newsletter and their web site. Both are well organized, and when they discovered that some of their customers couldn't read HTML e-mail, and that a newsletter designed as graphics didn't translate at all well to plain text, instead of blowing us off and saying "we can make a good living off the other eighty percent", they started posting copies of the newsletter on their website and sending links to firewalled people.
Faults: the search function could be refined a bit more, and I miss the third enlargement that allowed you to count the threads per inch in a swatch. There are reasons to eschew humongous files, but I live in hope that they'll work out a way to include detail shots.
Joy Beeson