I am not affiliated with any of these companies. These are just some of the apps I use regularly.
SUGGESTED APPS
Villa Rosa Designs sells postcard-sized patterns. They are a great and inexpensive way to build up your pattern library. The only problem is that it’s hard to keep track of which ones you already have. This app solves that. It allows you to track the patterns you have and the ones you want. It also allows you to browse Villa Rosa’s full collection and categorize your collection by pattern type.
Quiltful is a great app if you are ready to go digital with your quilt and project journaling. The application allows you to save and track all of your projects. The interface is nice and it is pretty stable although it has crashed on me a few times. If any part of your house looks like a fabric store blew up in it, this application is also great for keeping track of the fabric collections you have amassed and swear you’ll use someday.
It is available for iOS and Android and is free to download. It offers two different subscription tiers…essential and premium. At $29.99/year for “Essential” and $49.99/year for the “Premium” I think it is decidedly overpriced (monthly subscriptions are also available) but I will admit it has been super helpful but is it $50 worth of helpful? Borderline. A nice feature is that they allow you to try it out before making such a big commitment. You can add up to 10 projects to try it out. If you make as much stuff as I do, it is very helpful. If you only do a few projects a year, it would say it isn’t worth it.
I have played around with other applications that are for quilt journaling or at least say they are but Quiltful is the best one I have come across so far. At $50/year, it better be!
My Quilt is another application to consider if you just want a simple app to help keep track of your quilts. It says it is for quilt journaling but I think it is more just for logging your projects. The user interface is very basic and it doesn’t allow you to track as much information about your quilts as Quiltful. It is free though so it has that going for it. It also has a social media component so you can see what others have made and share your own creations.
Quilting Calc by Robert Kaufman is a handy app to have. It calculates fabric requirements for your quilting projects. It also converts from yardage to inches and visa versa.
Aurifil, the leading manufacturer of quilting thread, has come out with a basic application for keeping track of your collection. Super helpful if you’ve ever been in a fabric store and bought a spool of thread only to get home and realize you already had an unused spool. I don’t think it is useful for color matching as the colors in the app often don’t match the actual spool. For basic color matching, I would recommend downloading their free color chart. For the most accurate color matching, I would recommend splurging on the Aurifil Thread Chart. They also have a swatch book that is basically a paint chip fan deck. It is only slightly less expensive than the thread chart so I recommend just getting the thread chart that has actual samples of the thread.
The app is completely free. It is pretty basic but it gets the job done. At this time, there are 2 main drawbacks though. The first is that it doesn’t allow you to easily re-organize your spools. You can drag and drop them which is time-consuming when you’ve got 40+. It would be nice if you could have it automatically organize or sort threads by ID # or color. The second is that the colors (at least as they appear on my phone screen) are completely inaccurate. Therefore, you can’t use the app for color matching.