Crafter Jess Clement fell in love with craftmemo.com, a new site that is a craft record keeping and management tool for projects. She loves it so much, she even wrote up a review for us and shows us how to use the new Craft Memo site as place to inventory all your projects and supplies. Take it away, Jess!
Craft Memo is an online craft organizational program that lets you inventory your supplies, and manage your projects, and keep track of your suppliers.
To start off, you add all of your supplies into the Inventory list.
You can list the name, the category you’d like it to be in, the supplier, the color, the quantity in stock, the price, plus notes for anything else you’d like to say about it.
Once you have your inventory up to date, you can add a project. This lets you assign supplies from your inventory to specific projects, and also lets you post a picture, keep track of where you got the pattern, and how much the supplies for each project will cost (good, but also kind of sad – never fun to see the cold hard numbers!).
Current Projects I’m working on:
Individual Project Detail:
You also have a shopping list, where you can add any items from your inventory to a list you can easily print and take with you to the store. You can sort it by suppliers, or by type, just like your inventory list. Craft Memo will also automatically list any items you have less than 5 of on your front page.
From there you can do all sorts of things. You can look at a specific project to see what you might be missing for that project. You can look at each craft supply, and see if it is assigned to a certain project, or if you can use it for a new proejct. You can sort your inventory by suppliers or by type of supply. You can automatically print out a shopping list to take with you so you can easily see what you’re still needing.
Since I don’t have the room to really organize my supplies in one place (they’re tucked in places all over the house), I can organize all my supplies in one place online, and make the Type-A side of me happy. It’s a very new service, so it still has a few glitches in it, but the creater is always updating and adding new features – there’s a blog and a messaging board where you can let her know how Craft Memo would work better for you, and she seems to really take your comments into consideration.
So, here’s the short version of the good and bad of Craft Memo.
Pros:
Keeps a current list of everything you have – simple to add something to it when you purchase new supplies. Lets you assign supplies to projects. Then the assignment shows up in both your project page and your individual supply page. Makes it very easy to keep track of what supplies you’ve already committed to a project, and what supplies you have available to use for new projects. When you’ve finished a project, you can deduct those supplies from your inventory.
Can mark your supplies with categories, and then sort by those categories (For instance, I have three categories right now – bulky weight yarn, worsted weight yarn and needles). This way you can easily sort supplies in a way that makes sense for you – no more pulling out your entire stash to see what your options are.
Cons:
Can’t keep finished projects with supply requirements on the project list, since it will keep deducting yarn/components from your inventory. There’s no differentiation between usable items (yarns, beads, etc) and permanent items (needles, etc), so it will keep telling you to buy things, like needles, that are actually reusable.
ADVERTISEMENT
