My quilt "journal" is on my PC, I keep all my pertinent records in OneNote (part of the Microsoft Office software suite).
However, I am considering moving to paper, due to being inspired by my grandmother's quilting journal. She kept all her quilting stuff in 3-ring binders - things like her hand-drawn patterns, all her calculations for fabric needed, notes about how the quilt should be assembled...all that stuff is in there. It's so cool to flip through! I found her notes and patterns for quilts she made for me when I was a kid! I don't think she ever used someone else's pattern, she drafted everything herself. (I'm the same way! Now I know where I got it.)
The best part for me, though, was all the
other stuff she added. She sort of treated it like a journal and wrote little paragraphs about who each quilt was for and why she was making it - some very sweet comments in there about people we haven't seen or thought about in years, and charming to read about myself as "my new baby granddaughter". She also saved several of the newsletters from her quilting guild in that binder, with mentions of her quilts highlighted or circled. Those were fascinating to read through, too. Over 20 years worth of newsletters!
And at the end of the last binder, she knew when she was working on her last quilt (due to worsening health), and she wrote a two-page essay about what quilting had meant to her in her life and put it in there. Nobody in the family knew she'd written that until my aunt and I were flipping through her quilt journal a couple years ago and found it - 12 years after grandma passed away; 15 years after she stitched her last quilt.
We even found a little mystery - none of us recognized that last quilt that she wrote about and drew a pattern for! We found photos of her posing with it so we know it was completed, but apparently nobody in the family ever saw it in person or knows what she did with it, and she didn't list who it was for in the journal (though she did list that information for almost every other quilt). It's very strange! I took photos of the pattern grandma made for it, I might try to reproduce it some day.
(My theory is she donated it to her guild or gifted it to a guild mate - the photos look like they might have been taken at a guild meeting.)
So...I like my digital record-keeping because it's easy and convenient, but I can't imagine it having anything like the impact of all those three-ring binders of grandma's. My aunts and I treasure those binders! I don't know if anybody in my family will ever care about
my stuff as much, but I think I'd like to leave something like those binders behind anyway. And I do like drawing my quilts out on graph paper, even though I have EQ7. I should buy a binder and a three-hole punch and get it started.