I’ve worked a lot with various databases over the years, and it dawned on me that.:
A) we enter the amount and type of fabric we have and
B) we can also enter the amount and type of fabric required for a pattern.
Therefore it should be relatively easy to ask Stash Hub to search for appropriate fabric for a particular pattern (or vice versa?) Maybe most users don’t do this, but I’ve got loads of patterns, and a bunch of fabric, but it was almost all acquired separately. Or, because I’m a terrible ditherer, I change my mind several times. I’m guilty of creating several projects for the same fabric or pattern and then using the random “choose for me” to decide. Perhaps a random match up might lead to inspiration?
I do this manually. Choose a pattern, then look for fabrics by filtering length and type. I don’t have the information on fabric length requirements stored against each pattern
We did create a version of this idea but unfortunately it didn’t work quite well enough to be useful.
It required all the fields to be fully filled in in all the records to be able to return a good number of accurate matches. Testers found it was returning a lot of potential matches that wouldn’t work.
There were also issues with Length Required:
some people add requirements for different sizes if they make for different people, so it would return a match but not in your size
patterns usually give requirements for a couple of widths whereas fabrics can come in almost any width
Sometimes people were happy for suggestions that were a bit under the recommended length but the tolerance varies depending on designer and project and there way no way it could capture that nuance.
It is a really great idea. We’d love to be able to make it work, but it’s on the back burner for some additional consideration for now.
As @JD3205 suggests, you could use filters on your pattern collection to see if that throws up any new ideas.
