knit style: organizing those digital patterns

earlier this summer, i made the decision to move all my patterns off of ravelry and onto my own site. this decision, which was not made lightly or quickly or in reaction to a single event, has not only required me to do a shit ton of admin work/hire a dear one to do some of that work for me (super grateful to be in the position to delegate work and pay someone else a living wage at this point in my biz), but has also required me to figure out some major workarounds for my customers. ravelry has changed our industry drastically over the 13 years they’ve been around, and while they are no longer some wee grassroots project (they’re valued at millions of dollars and have millions of users nowadays - while it remains a free platform for casual users, the commercial side of the site generates significant income from designers and other industry players through fees and ads), they have embedded some pretty major habits for those of us who use/have used the site.

arguably the two biggest considerations for me in moving away from the site have been figuring out a) how to maintain an easy way for shops to continue selling my patterns directly to their customers (still working on that one, the current method of wholesale invoices works for some shops and less so for others) and b) how to help regular customers maintain an easy-to-search library for those next projects. which brings us to the purpose of this blog post! i’m going to share some of my top tips and tricks for keeping an organized library of digital patterns on a hard drive/in the cloud. obviously you can absolutely print physical copies of your patterns and organize them however you’d like in that way, but for those of us who maintain a digital library of patterns, there are many different ways to keep files organized and easy to search for in your computer’s brain. i’ve been doing this for many years with my sewing patterns, so i’ll be using similar methods for my own knitting pattern collection.

tip 1) choose a primary organization method.

this could be by yarn weight, by sizes, by type of garment, by recipient, by recommended fibre, by needle size…personally, i organize my patterns by type of item because that’s the most likely reason i’m rooting through for a new project. my secondary organization method would be by yarn weight. depending on how much time you want to spend organizing your patterns, you could either create sub-folders (i.e. GARMENTS -> FINGERING WEIGHT GARMENTS) or use tags to help you add some extra search tools.

tip 2) open up space on your computer’s internal hard drive by saving patterns on an external hard drive and/or in the cloud

(but make sure that you continually save files in these locations, otherwise it’ll get messy pretty quickly and you’ll lose track of files.)

tip 3) have your files saved in at least two locations.

i’ve had both external hard drives crash on me and the cloud go funny, so now i back up all my files in both locations to be safe. if there’s a pattern you especially love, there’s no harm in printing off a physical back up just to be extra safe!

tip 4) make sure that whatever method(s) you use are ones that feel natural to you.

if you try to use a very complicated organizational system or save your files in an external hard drive that you never remember to do back-ups on, you’re more likely to lose track of your organized library and get frustrated/abandon it.

tip 5) do this regardless of whether you continue using ravelry or not.

my own recent experiences with the site, as well as those of many of my colleagues, have just reinforced the reminder that ravelry is not some magical permanent space that will always feel good or even always exist. if you never download your purchases, you are essentially letting your files function like netflix - if something happened and ravelry shut down/got hacked/changed their access suddenly, you’d have no real access to the items you’ve paid money for. so at the very least, consider starting to save at least your favourite patterns off the site. hey, the next time your internet access gets disrupted by a storm, you’ll be happy you have a back-up of that pattern in your queue so you can keep knitting, right?

this is your obligatory reminder that you have until the end of august 2020 to download my patterns from your ravelry library to make sure you maintain access to them. email reminders are being sent for all purchasers from 2014-2020, but just in case, make sure you grab your patterns since i don’t know whether you’ll still have access to your files through ravelry once i’m off the platform on september 1.