Keeping track - the Android way

Barbara posted a wonderful blog post about iPhone apps to help you manage your fabric stash, pattern haul, cataloguing your thread, notions, books and equipment and other very useful sewing applications.

I am incredibly jealous because those unfortunately don't work on my Android phone. I am gutted! I could so do with an app that allows me to list all the dressmaking patterns I own.



I now found one app now that's pretty good at giving you a portable inventory of your fabrics - it is called Clothio.  You can pick photos of your fabric that you have already taken, or snap a new one from within the app (you get a copy of the photo in your phone camera directory).

You can specify the colour or colours present, whether you own it and how much of it (width and length).  You can tick several types of fibres (more than one if it's a blend) although this may not represent all the different kinds of fibres that exist. And select the kind of pattern, or none, of the fabric.

The header section allows you to name your fabric (I like to go with my initial impulse because I can remember it the best - particularly if it's a really silly name. Like Stardust Ziggy, or Wavy Art Deco - or anything equally wacky), you can make that longer by including the colour or fibre content because this name will show in two lines on the screen, though extremely long names would presumably get cut short.

The shop or source option allows you to list a specific shop or in my case just 'Goldhawk Rd', 'Brighton' or 'Walthamstow' because I can never remember the actual name. It'll do just nicely.  This will bring the named option up when you enter more fabrics, so you don't have to retype the information.

The 'Designer' option is a good one: this will show up as a subtitle under the name you've given your fabric, so if you want to use this for other information (like 'sheer', 'non-drapey' or 'feels plasticky' or anthing else you come up with) then add it here.



Clothio allows you to filter your fabrics by certain options, like colour.  It is really useful to do when you have to remind yourself what kinds of fabrics you have when you are looking to match your pattern with the best fabric. Let me know how you are getting on with this if you are also using it! That would be

I will keep looking for more apps to use on an Android but this one is the only one I found so far.

Does anyone else have a tip for me?  Something you use that works well for you?

I have also considered using an app for something like a photo organiser (I think there is Photobook and Picasa?) and see if I can organise fabrics or perhaps my patterns by using specific tags that will make it all searchable and filterable (if that's a word).  And a sewing app review mentioned a database called Memento that could work too - I'll have to check that out.

Please leave a comment if you can think of anything useful!

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