How I Use Trello to Manage Sewing Projects

I'm the kind of sewist who has a million projects going on at once, and I work on a wide range of projects, including quilts and garments.

Because I have so much going on, I sometimes struggle with getting clarity on what I want to work on next, and I also tend to forget progress and blockers like "oh crap I can't work on this quilt again until I find the perfect backing fabric" or, "I'd love to make a dress with this challis but I haven't found the perfect pattern yet."

In order to solve these problems, I created a workflow in Trello to manage all the important details for each project and help me keep things moving.

I'm going to go through how I use it and some of the functionality so hopefully you'll be able to see how it might be helpful for you even if your needs are different than mine.

How to Set Up a Trello Board

Trello is a free, web-based tool and has all sorts of ways to customize the set up to meet your specific needs. A huge benefit of a tool like this is it helps you visualize everything, however you could easily set up a similar system using post-it notes or something else low-tech. I'll cover that later!

1. Sign up

Go to Trello's website and set up a free account. 

2. Create a Board

Next, create a new board by clicking the "+" sign on the top right and selecting Create Board from the dropdown.

3. Name your board, set a privacy level, and choose a background. 

You can get to more board background options by clicking the "..." box on the right.

Set privacy level.

Board backgrounds - if you click "See more" there are a gajillion more options to choose from.

Click "Create Board" and you're done.

4. Set up your sewing workflow. 

Use "Add a list" to create column headers for each stage of your sewing workflow.

What a new, blank board looks like.

To show how this works in practice, I'll jump ahead and show you my finished board. You might want to set yours up differently depending on what challenges you experience.

My "Lists" aka workflow

I set up 5 steps in my workflow.

• To Do/Backlog
• Doing/WIP (works-in-progress)
• To Photograph
• To Blog
• Done

Personally, I use Pinterest as my holding zone for all ideas that appeal to me, and projects only make it onto my Trello board once I'm seriously considering it. However, if that's the aspect you'd find most helpful to track, you may want to make more granular "To Do" columns.

I've included some links at the bottom of this post to others in the sewing blogosphere who are using Trello in different ways. There are a million ways to customize it: sewing workflows are definitely not one size fits all.

Here's what my board looks like with cards on it:

5. Create cards.

Click "Add a card," which you'll find at the bottom of each column, to add a piece of work that will move through the workflow.

Name your card: 

In this example my card is called "Cashmerette Appleton," named after the pattern I used for this garment.

Add Attachments/pictures: 

I've already taken in-progress photos of this pattern so I added it as an attachment. Because it's a photo, it shows up in the main view of the card, which is helpful for visualizing your work. For something I haven't made yet, I might add photos of inspiration photos, line drawings, potential fabric choices, etc.

Description: 

You can enter any static information about the pattern in the description. For example, I could link to the pattern's website/purchase link if I was still considering it, or enter sizing information, price, etc.

Comments: 

I use comments for progress information, like details on why something is blocked.

Due Date: 

If you have an actual due date you can add it and it will show up on the card for easy reference and you can even view it on a calender. For example, if you are making a quilt as a gift for a baby shower and you have a hard deadline or you want to make a dress before an event.

Labels: 

Labels can be used like tags. Here's how I set up my labels:

I created labels for different kinds of projects (Quilts, garments, other projects) and also to denote blockers. I differentiated between a "material" blocker (like waiting for fabric) and a "decision" blocker (like deciding on a fabric). 

Labels are helpful because you can easily visualize projects on the main board because of the colors, and also because you can sort with them. So if I want to only see my quilting projects, I can filter the board.

To filter, you want to click "Show menu) at the top right, and then click "Filter Cards":

Then select the filter you want to see:

Now, I can see all of my quilting projects without the clutter of all my other projects.

If I was about to do a fabric purchase, I might want to filter on all my blocked cards to see if I needed to get anything to unblock them:

Checklists: 

I use checklists almost as a sub-workflow for different kinds of projects.

I have a standard quilting checklist that I use to track the different standard stages of a quilt. I started this by adding the checklist to one card and then simply select the same checklist in other cards like by creating a checklist in the other card and selecting "Copy Items From..." and then selecting the checklist I want:

My garment checklist looks a bit different:

Different kinds of cards: 

My workflow is generally linear, in that something starts at the beginning and works its way through each column to the end. Of course I might decide not to photograph or blog something, and move it straight to done, but I usually don't. I can also abandon a project that was in-progress and move it straight to "done" (as in I'm done with it, even though it's not done), or can decide to never pull a project from the backlog.

I also sometimes write blog posts about things that are not strictly sewing projects...like this one. I also use my Trello board to create cards as placeholders for those ideas.

You'll also notice that my backlog is mostly my garment fabric stash. I put a visual reminder of the fabric and note how much I have, as well as fabric properties like knit/stretch, pattern, etc. In order for one of these cards to make it into the workflow, I'd have to marry it with an actual pattern, at which point this card would start to look very different.  

I tend to start with a fabric and then decide on a pattern, so this works for me and helps me keep my fabric stash top of mind when I'm browsing patterns. So if I see that I have lots of nice knits in dress yardages, maybe I should go look for a knit dress pattern!

Once I find more tried-and-true patterns I might need to alter the structure of this board a bit.

6. Move cards through the workflow:

Just drag and drop! That's what makes Trello so easy to use. You can move things around without needing to go into each individual card and make changes.

Low-Tech Options

If that all sounds like way more detail or technology than you want or need, you can also apply the same principles to a low-tech option.

You can set up something similar with a whiteboard/corkboard or even just a wall and some post it notes. Use tape or marker (if you're using a whiteboard) to draw columns and you're in business.

You can just write the name of the project on the post it, or even tape on a photo you've printed out to it. You might find you need somewhere else to track additional details, but a simple dedicated notebook with each project getting its own page would probably work just fine.

Smash the Stash has a great post on using post-its to manage her workflow and a notebook to track the finer details of her projects. She has some nice photos to show her process in action.

Elita Sharpe wrote a nice guest post on Angela Walters' site that shows how she manages projects for her professional longarm business using a low-tech system.

Was that helpful?

I hope you found this helpful and I'd love to hear about your own sewing workflows and organization methods, or even just the challenges you face that you're still trying to solve! Thanks for reading. :)

Other inspiration:

Ivete at Gotham Quilts uses Trello to create a quilting workflow.

Helen at Helen's Closet organizes projects by type and uses tags to note status and things like pattern format.

Camille at Attack of the Seam Ripper uses Trello boards to track her fabric stash, patterns, and set sewing deadlines.

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This post was inspired by an interaction I had with a fellow sewist on Instagram. She was using a simple and effective post-it method to track sewing and it got me thinking about combining the way I organize projects at work with the problems I was having with organizing my sewing. Unfortunately I can't find that interaction, otherwise I would shout out to my muse!

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This post started as a 3-part series that had 2 parts that went into wayyyyy too much detail about Kanban, lean manufacturing, the concept of "waste" in the process, user stories, acceptance criteria, etc. I realize that that's probably too far down the rabbit hole for most readers, but if you're interested in the theory behind this kind of workflow, I'd encourage you to do a web search for some of those terms. These kinds of project planning theories and tools have become very popular in the business/technology world since around 2005, so you may even be familiar with it from your own 9-5.