The Pattern You Cannot Find When the Fabric Is Already Cut
The sewing pattern stash grows faster than any cataloguing system that is not deliberately maintained. McCalls envelopes in one box, Vogue in another, the Great British Sewing Bee books on a shelf, digital pattern PDFs on a hard drive, and the specific Simplicity blouse pattern you bought at a sale two years ago — the one that works over a 45-inch tweed — somewhere. You are standing at the cutting table with 2.5 metres of midweight wool gabardine and you need to know before you commit the scissors.
This is the cost of an unsearchable pattern library. The fabric waits, the decision stalls, and you end up buying another pattern online because finding the existing one is faster.
The Fabric Width Fields That Actually Prevent Waste
The 45-inch and 60-inch yardage fields are the two most practically useful pieces of data in the entire record. Fabric does not come in one width. Broadcloth, cotton poplin, and most quilting fabrics typically run 44-45 inches. Wool coating, suiting, and most European silks tend toward 58-60 inches. Linen ranges unpredictably. A pattern instruction that says "you need 3 yards" is incomplete if you do not know which width that assumes.
If you are working with a 60-inch wool crepe and the 60-inch yardage for the pattern is 1.8 metres while the 45-inch yardage is 2.5 metres, buying at the 45-inch figure wastes 0.7 metres of an expensive fabric. Over the course of a year's worth of projects, this compounds. The pattern catalog that carries both measurements lets you check at the point of fabric purchase, not at the cutting table.
The Notions field is where the non-obvious requirements live. The envelope says "medium zipper" and you arrive home from the fabric shop with no zipper and a dressmaking evening blocked. The notions field for that pattern already says "22cm invisible zip, 2x size 18 snaps, 1.2m of 25mm cotton twill tape for stays." You copy the list before you leave the house.
The Two Identifiers That Make the Archive Searchable
Brand and pattern number together form the unique identifier for any commercial pattern. Butterick B6789 is not the same as McCalls M7891. A rating field of 1-5 stars adds your own use history: a pattern rated 5 means the fit worked first time and the construction logic was sound; a pattern rated 2 means the ease is cut for a different body shape and you will spend two hours toiling it before getting anything wearable.
The Brand field covers the key publishers — Vogue, McCall's, Simplicity, Butterick, New Look, Threadcount, Love at First Stitch, and the Great British Sewing Bee volumes. The Vintage tag in the Items field is worth flagging separately: a 1960s Vogue Couturier Design has different seam allowance conventions (typically 5/8-inch stated but with deeper built-in allowances in certain areas) from a current indie pattern publisher using 1cm throughout. If the vintage classification is in the record, you know to check which convention applies before threading the machine.
The Cover image field is the one that collapses search time to almost nothing. A thumbnail of the pattern envelope or cover page lets you visually scan results rather than reading entry titles. The pattern you half-remember — the shift dress with the interesting pleat detail at the yoke — is visible in three seconds of scrolling rather than requiring you to reconstruct the exact title from memory.
Notes carries everything the structured fields cannot: "lower the back neckline by 2cm before cutting," "the collar stand is too short for shirt-weight fabric — add 5mm to height," "check Facebook group for SA fix on size 16 sleeve."