I live in the UK, the glorious home of cross stitch magazines. I often buy 3 a month - Cross Stitch Crazy, Cross Stitcher and The World of Cross Stitch. While having access to so many amazing patterns is a great thing, piles and piles of magazines are not. Here's 5 things I do to try and keep on top of them:

1. I tear them apart. Yep, I don't think many stitchers here keep all of their magazines in tact and that's basically proven by the amount of charts on eBay that are just charts pulled from magazines. I do this too, seperating the big charts and the little charts.


Spot the dummy. #momlife

2. Boxing. There's so many ways to store these charts but I personally love a box. Folders are fine but wallets can be expensive - and if you tip them the wrong way by accident you have a large clean up. I tape my sheets together with sticky tape turned into tabs (might be a post for another day!) and pile them all in a box. I did try a box file in the shop but the button broke when I pressed it...

3. A fat A5 notebook. This is down to preference but I like having all my small charts in one place, so I cut them all out and get gluing using a DoCrafts glue stick. You have to be careful that the glue doesn't get onto the page too much as it can stick the pages together and don't forget the key! I cut out just the DMC section of each key as I know I'll never use the other brands.

4. Issue numbers. I make sure I know where my charts came from by writing down the issue in the book or on the chart for later. If someone wants to know where the chart came from later I can easily inform them.

5. Back to front. Do you know what my pet peeve is? After August until December, most of the magazines are Christmas, Christmas, Christmas. You can expect nothing but Christmas themed charts for half of the year which is pretty excessive. I don't often like Christmas charts but I've stuck the ones I do like in the back of my book, working towards the front. That way I don't have to dig through the whole book trying to find the Christmas charts inbetween.

How do you organise your charts and magazines?

Vee x