Why was Craftinery created?

When a hobby starts getting annoying

Handmade is, first and foremost, my hobby. It’s supposed to be enjoyable — a way to make things and switch off from everything else. But when one part of a hobby becomes so annoying that the lack of organisation alone is enough to put you off doing it, that becomes a very real problem.

At some point I stopped knowing exactly what materials I had, how much was left, or where I’d written down the details of a particular project. Notes ended up in several notebooks, piles of loose paper, my phone, and sometimes even on receipts or shipping boxes. Templates and patterns turned into a jumble of folders, binders and random places I only remembered existed when I needed to find something.

Then there were project photos, colour cards, templates, my own crochet project ideas, and notes on patterns I’d bought and later changed as I worked. With craft projects, it’s also very easy to lose the little details that seem obvious while you’re making something and suddenly matter a lot a few weeks later.

Commissioned work

It was even harder with commissioned work. I wanted to know how much material I had actually used, how long the work had taken, and use that to put a sensible value on it. If I forgot to track the time or part of the information was left on some random piece of paper, reconstructing it afterwards could be practically impossible.

In the end, information about a single project could be scattered across paper, my phone gallery, notes, several folders and a binder.

An absolute mess.

One place, close at hand

And because I’m basically never far from my phone or the internet, I decided that was where I wanted a place to keep all of it together.

That’s how Craftinery started.

I built Craftinery myself as my own project — from the first idea and assumptions, through features, tests and decisions about how the app should work. It was made for me first, and I still use it in my own craft projects. I also keep developing it around the problems I run into in practice as a crafter.

I hope it ends up being useful to other people who love making things too — but enjoy the “I definitely saved that pattern somewhere” part a lot less.