The jacket that took "a weekend" actually took four hours cutting, ninety minutes on the sleeves, forty minutes on the collar and lapels, two hours on buttonholes and buttons, and three separate sessions of fitting adjustments. What you remember is the weekend. What actually happened is 10-plus hours of tracked labor, not counting the hour spent on two pattern adjustments that didn't make it into any log because you didn't have one.
Process-Level Time Tracking
What Process? with Time Logged and Timestamp create the granular breakdown that transforms vague time estimates into real data. The same garment type logged across four projects shows where the labor actually lives — and it's almost never where sewists assume it is. Buttonholes take three times as long as most people budget. Fitting adjustments are the invisible hours because they don't feel like sewing time. Pattern alterations before cutting add an hour that never gets counted because it happened before the fabric was touched.
The process breakdown also reveals which techniques are slowing you down relative to expected time. If your sleeves consistently take twice the logged time of an equivalent sewist whose process time you can compare against, that's where instruction or practice investment returns the most time savings per project going forward.
Sewing Project Name with Pattern Name and Pattern Designer creates the project identity that makes the log searchable and comparable. Three projects from the same pattern by the same designer, sewn in different fabrics at different skill levels, should show a reducing time curve — the first iteration takes longest, subsequent makes are faster as the construction sequence becomes familiar. That learning curve is invisible without per-project time records.
The Fabric Cost Record
Where is Fabric From? and Cost of Fabric (if known) are the materials costing fields. A handmade garment has a real cost that most sewists underestimate because they don't include labor and they don't track materials costs consistently. Knowing that the wool blazer required £45 of fabric from a specific supplier and 12 hours of labor tells you the actual cost of the garment — which informs decisions about fabric quality investments (is it worth spending an extra £20 for better fabric on a project that will take 15 hours?), about whether to commission repairs or remake, and about pricing if the garment is being made for someone else.
The supplier record is also the practical reference for when the fabric runs out mid-project. A specific fabric from a specific supplier logged at the time of purchase means you have the exact source information when you need to buy more — rather than trying to remember which of the four online shops you ordered from last spring.
Sewn For: as Project Context
Sewn For: is the recipient field that adds context to the time and cost data. A garment sewn for yourself has different fitting iteration requirements than one sewn for someone who can only attend one fitting. A garment sewn as a gift has a deadline constraint that a personal project doesn't. Notes: handles everything else: the fitting issue that required a re-cut, the technique that was new on this project, the supplier who had poor quality control on this specific fabric lot, the alteration that worked better than expected.
Photo: closes the project record with the visual result. The time log tells you how long it took; the photo shows what it produced. Both together are what you want when evaluating whether a pattern is worth making again.