accurate down to the last 0.5mm

The studio front has been a bit quiet these past few days - I also have the need to declutter my brain every now and again so, you know, some things got to give.

Yesterday I finally kicked myself and organised my studio's expenses bookkeeping. It took less than 15 minutes and it gives me a sense of satisfaction knowing that the taxman won't be able to twist my arm so much if he decides to pop round looking for some extra cash to extort. My handbag interior looks a lot less like a paper shredder's bin, too.

I then decided to kick myself to look into precise manufacturing. Erm, apparently I need a table that's at least 8 metres long. Which means that a lot of things (power points, light switches etc) will have to get reshuffled around to fit an at-least-eight-metre-long table. That, and a few other details (such as a loading bay, specific electricity requirements and a bigger vehicle access road) mean that there are a lot things I need to sort. They're not great news to my ears and budget. It makes me feel operationally incompetent when in truth I am probably, well, operationally incompetent.

Another thing that I need to organise is my patterns. I have boxfuls of them, garment patterns, and apparently I first need to number the styles (not too big an inconvenience), before proceeding to assign a number. To. Every. Single. Pattern. Piece.
When we talk about patterns generated for my designs, in every collection I have a few styles that consist of 40+ different pieces. That works out to around 100 different panels for each style, some of them measuring as small as 5cm across (where do I get the space to write all the information on them?!) Numbering them all doesn't sound like fun work.
I would really like to hire a pattern professional to help me out, but sadly in here they are few and far between... and they're not always 0.5mm accurate as I would like them (and myself) to be.

There is also the added irritation of going from hi-fi to lo-fi. I interned at a high-tech textile print company after graduation. I get used to shuffling things around on computers because it's faster and tidier that way. What is geographically available to me where I am now based is a lot of this rather labour-intensive thing called batik... which I generally do not like in many of its traditional insurrections. Batik is one demon that I need to master, too, if I want to be the master of all evil fashiony things.

Alright, that's all for now. There's enough things now on my metaphorical 'in' box.