My craft field journal

A notepad idea inspired by Elise Joy

I’m terrible at keeping notes about my craft projects. I’m so excited to get going, I forget to write down what size I’m knitting, which needles I’m using, sometimes even the name of the pattern. If I’m sewing and making adjustments as I go, I’ll tweak and sew, try on and cut, pin and stitch. Suddenly I’ve got a completed pair of jeans - yay! Did I write down what I was doing as I did it? Absolutely not.

The problem with this over enthusiastic approach, is if I want to make something similar in the future, I’ve got nothing to reference. I always think I’ll remember the yarn or the size or the pattern, but fast forward 5 years and it’s a different story. There’s nothing more frustrating than having to knit yet another gauge square, when you know you’ve done one in the past but you didn’t make a note of the needle size or yarn you used.

I’ve had various false starts at journaling over the years. I know it’s super trendy right now, with all the gen Z kids getting into analogue activities (yes I will be making one of these trifold leather journals at some point in the future), but I’ve always struggled to make the time. I’ve had multiple rounds of counselling where I’ve been told by therapists that journaling is helpful for mindfulness (another activity I don’t prioritise) and for getting all your jumbled thoughts out of your overactive anxious brain, but when I sit down to do it all I can think about is the dozens of other, more practical (in my mind) activities I ‘should’ be doing.

The upshot of this is that I have multiple different notepads, scattered throughout the house, none of which I use on a regular basis. Most of these are pads I haven’t chosen for myself either, which I do think makes a difference. They’ve come free from conferences or been gifted by well meaning relatives who don’t know my personal style. I don’t think a notepad needs to be overly chic, but I do think it needs to be aesthetically pleasing or else you won’t want to reach for it.

My craft notepad was a case in point. A chintzy floral design (pretty but not my personal choice) with glue-binding (making it difficult to add in swatches without it becoming unusably thick), it was filled with useless, out-of-date projects from earlier iterations of my personal style. Notes on patterns I never made, that I know for sure I never will make, it felt bloated and useless to my current sartorial preferences.

Elise Joy spoke on her newsletter recently, about starting what she called a ‘craft field journal’ and I found this concept very inspiring. The idea is not to be overly curated or aesthetic about your notes, unless that is your chosen creative hobby, but just to get the ideas and thoughts down on paper. Stick in the swatches, the yarn labels, the swing tags. Note down the size of needles, the size of pattern, the size of yarn. It doesn’t need to be pretty, it just needs to be done, so you have a reference for the future.

To that end, I bought this spiral bound hardback plain black notebook from the Range. It’s nothing special, it cost £1.99, so I have no qualms about using it or ‘spoiling’ it by making a mistake. I went through my old notepad and removed any information that still felt pertinent or useful, and recycled the rest. It felt liberating to release all those old projects, some failures, some false starts, and copy over the successes that I may make again in the future.

Next up will be my mindfulness journal. But that’s a story for another day! How do you organise your hobby notes?