The iPad/iPhone app Sewing Kit HD enables you to track your sewing projects, patterns, notions, fabric stash, references, and inspiration and keeps the information at your fingertips.
If you’re an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch user, there’s an app you can use to track your sewing patterns, stash, project inspiration, and even project progress: Sewing Kit HD by Vesta Software LLC. This handy app enables you to scan a barcode on the back of a McCall’s, Simplicity, Butterick, Vogue, New Look, Jalie, Nueue Mode, Burda Style, or KwikSew pattern, and it automatically downloads the envelope images, including the envelope back (if available online), so you can always have the pattern drawings and the yardage and fabric suggestions at your fingertips.
Sewing Kit HD also helps you track your fabric, notions, books, and equipment by taking photographs or scanning product barcodes and adding notes and details, so you always know what’s in your stash and your work room. You can link notions, fabric, thread, and patterns together as projects and track your progress through photos. The app also lets you store a list of people for whom you sew, along with their measurements, and link this information to projects, as well. And you can curate sewing inspiration through photographs, websites, stores, or anything else that inspires your projects.
Purchase the Sewing Kit HD app from the Apple iTunes App Store for $8.99.
Do you like to use apps to organize and keep track of your sewing and craft projects? Are they ever as useful as they sound?
I'm a member of the Club BMV (Butterick, McCalls, Vogue) and so got early news of this app's significant update and partnership with McCall's. I installed it mid-June and have been using it heavily since. I wanted to absolutely love it. To a large extent it does what it says it will, and it has already saved me some wasteful purchases (duplicates, extra "just to be safe" yardage because I don't have the pattern with me when I find the perfect fabric).
The backup/restore between devices using Dropbox has worked well for me, so I can keep iPad and iPhone synchronized, but this is NOT an automatic synch. You need to make sure you make your updates from just one device, or you need to make sure you've restored all previous updates before adding new stuff to a different device. If you do buy regularly from the various McCall's brands the app will automatically add patterns you buy direct to your pattern library as soon as you open the app after you've made your purchase.
It is supposed to pull previous pattern purchases from your account when you set it up the first time. I say supposed to because the app is unstable as all get out. It just up and quits with an alarming frequency, typically during adds/edits. The first was on its initial setup/import of old purchases, so I got maybe 40%, weirdly the oldest ones, and there's no way to tell it to re-try. I had to manually add the rest, which isn't difficult, except for the constant crashes. If it crashes while it's searching for the pattern in its database the screen loses the tab for yardage info and it never comes back, so even when it pulls the photos and the rest of the info, no yardage. Your only option at that point is to take a picture of the envelop back and add it to the photos section. So, sort of a pain, but pretty well worth it to have all that info at your fingertips wherever you are.
The fabric database is going to save me huge headaches in tracking care instructions, but is not going to replace the big safety pin with the swatches for current projects in the purse. Not the app's fault, computer photo reproductions are just not that accurate, color-wise, but app and swatches together are unbeatable in the shops.
There's a space to save how much you paid for fabric that has never worked for me--type it in, save, and back to $0.00. No biggie for me as a home-sewer, but a working seamstress would surely find this useful info to track. Having the measurements for the people I sew for in one easily accessible place is also huge. I had stuff scattered all over before, Evernote, post-its, a mess.
This comment is getting out of control huge so I'll sum up. I've worked in high tech my entire career, and I've never continued to use a piece of software this crash-prone and unstable. It can be fantastically frustrating to get your data in there (crashes mainly on add/edit, not subsequent reads), BUT it is just so gosh darn fabulous to have all the info about every pattern you own and the fabric in your stash in your pocket all the time that I decided it was worth it. So yes, unstable, yes, pricey for an iPad app (would need to be due to the smaller pool of potential buyers for essentially a sophisticated database), but in the end I use it all the time, both in the fabric store and in the sewing room. If you can stand the pain of adding your stashes (pattern & fabric) you will thank yourself for doing it.
I have had this app for almost a year now! Only problem is getting all those already purchased patterns and extremely large stash of fabric into the app. I have to admit if I had just taken a day or two to add all my patterns I would not have ended up with two duplicates. There has been a few crashes along the way but he has been updating pretty regularly to fix all the bugs. It does come in handy at the fabric store. I should use it more often but I really don't. But don't blame the app.. I am a procrastinator and totally unorganized.
For those of who don't have a tablet, only a laptop, is there a way we could get this application and start getting ready for when we do finally come to the 21st century?
I wish they make apps like this for droid phones.
If you're interested in this app for Android devices or for devices running on other operating systems, I suggest that you contact the app's developer, Vesta Software (www.vestasoftware.com), and let them know. Currently, the developer is not planning an Android-compatible version because so few requests for it have been received, but if you let them know that there is more demand for it, perhaps they'll add an Android app to their development schedule.
A special thank you, Redhead_Kara, for taking the time to provide a thorough review of your use of this app. It appears that the Vesta app doesn't deliver all that is promised, from all the reviews I've read.
I'm wondering if there are any programs offered that are designed to work on an Android. I tried the vesta.com link and ended up on a page written in a Middle-Eastern language of some kind...
So much potential...the bones of this app are great..but execution is letting it down. I am disappointed especially given the high cost. Please talk to your developer, get the photo taking area improved, inconsistent sometimes photos work sometimes deletes the photos already taken and won't allow me to choose primary thumbnail.
Yardage - really want to be able to put a photo here and to have the option to manually load.
Sections like projects and yardage don't seem to be working properly.
Happy to volunteer as a beta tester for new developments.
I bought this app over a year ago. It crashes and freezes a LOT. Getting the right picture to show in the list is dicey, also. Still, it was the only app I knew of that I could use to keep track of my pattern stash.
Yesterday I upgraded to iOS 9 and found that Sewing Kit was gone from my iPhone. I certainly did not delete it! I downloaded it again and found that all of my pattern information was completely wiped! Scores of patterns! There is no way I'm going to enter them all again.
This app is a great idea but extremely buggy. I'm going to give a different app a try now: Pattern Pal.