Quilting Magazines - How To Organize?

We all enjoy purchasing beautiful quilting magazines, but what is the best way to store and utilize them to our best advantage? Here are a few ideas of what your fellow quilters do.

Limited Space Option for Quilting Magazines

If your quilting studio does not afford you unlimited space, you may wish to read your quilting magazines and then clip out the articles or patterns that you would like to save and recycle the remainder of the magazine. Quilters suggest dividing the articles by technique and then by project type and storing the articles or patterns in a plastic sleeve inside a binder.

For instance, you may have a binder dedicated to applique with dividers labeled for wall hangings, pillows, large quilts, baby quilts, and seasonal quilts.

Storage - No Problem!

If you have plenty of shelf space and can preserve your beautiful magazines in full, quilters still like to categorize their treasures. Some will organize their magazines by title and shelve the magazines in alphabetical order. Other quilters choose to group their magazines by type making sections on their shelves for modern, primitive, quick, and traditional learning magazines. Some quilters go a bit further and use Post-It notes as flags to mark the pages that are of most interest to them, or using different color Post-It’s to indicate the type of project (yellow for pieced projects, pink for appliqué, green for Christmas projects, etc).

Pass It On!

This idea seems to be the most popular with recycling and reuse enthusiasts. They like to scan the articles they like and store them on their computers so that they have only the articles and patterns that most interest them and they can still pass on the original magazine to a friend, co-worker, or their guild.

Go Digital

Are you aware of all of the newer digital magazines that allow you to download your magazine copy to your computer? This option saves you physical storage space, saves paper, and postage. The only downsides to digital magazines are that you will have to print out your own templates and that you are not able to share your magazines

Online Quilt Magazine Options:

• Quilt Pattern Magazine
• Online Quilt Magazine
• Quilting Arts Magazine