Sorted!

Volunteers at Lee Mills have been sorting the Knitting and Crochet Guild's collection of pattern leaflets for months now, first by spinner and then numerically.  There were dozens of boxes to sort - mostly they were completely mixed up at the beginning, and so we labelled them "Patterns Unsorted".   I showed a photo of some of them a couple of weeks ago here.  For a long time, it seemed that going through all the "Patterns Unsorted" boxes was such a huge task that we would never get to the end of it - there aren't many volunteers, we all have other things to do. 

The pattern sorting boxes at Lee Mills

In the office is a wall of shelving, with boxes labelled for the different spinners,  and as we went through the unsorted patterns, we would put each one into its proper box. When a box was filled, it would be moved out onto another set of shelves. There are about 65 sorting boxes, from Argyll to Woolworths, via Bairns-Wear, Bestway, Copley, Emu, Robin, Sirdar, Wendy and many more.  Patons has several boxes all to itself,  and there is a "Small Spinners" box, because even 65 boxes is not enough to cover all possibilities.

And then last week, I finished the last few of the "Patterns Unsorted" boxes!  Woohoo!   This is a significant milestone on the way to getting the pattern leaflets completely sorted.  We still have to sort the boxes of each spinner's patterns into numerical order, but we have been doing some of that in parallel, and we are more than a third done already.    

And so now the wall of boxes will no longer be needed.  We can re-use the space and make it look more like a pattern library than a mail sorting office.   I feel very pleased.