Crafting and hobbies
Hobby Trackers
Free printable trackers for the things people actually keep records of: books, films, the vegetable bed, the yarn stash, the craft cupboard and the pile of half-finished projects. Six sheets, all editable, all print-accurate.
Four steps
How to print a hobby tracker
- 1
Pick the sheet
Reading, film, garden, yarn, craft or projects.
- 2
Set the row height
Taller rows give more room to write and fit fewer per page.
- 3
Name it
Give the sheet your own heading if the default does not suit.
- 4
Print it
Anything that does not fit continues onto another page.
Why these six
Every one of these is a record people already keep badly: in a notes app they never reopen, on the back of an envelope, or in their head. The value of a printed sheet is that it is in the room where the activity happens. A yarn inventory is useful in the cupboard, not on a phone in another room.
| Sheet | The column that matters |
|---|---|
| Reading challenge | Prompts, so you read outside the usual shelf |
| Film log | One short line, written the same evening |
| Garden planner | A squared bed, drawn before anything is bought |
| Yarn inventory | Dye lot, the one everybody omits |
| Craft inventory | Where it is kept, so it is not bought twice |
| Project tracker | State, including abandoned |
Planning a bed on squares
The garden sheet gives you a squared area and a planting table, in that order, because the drawing has to come first. The commonest mistake in a vegetable bed is reading the spacing on a seed packet, deciding it is generous, and planting closer. Drawing the bed to scale first makes it obvious how few courgette plants actually fit, before any money is spent.
Write your scale in the corner. One square as 30 cm or one foot is the usual choice, which makes the sixteen square depth about five metres.
Recording what you abandoned
The project tracker has a state column rather than a finished tick, and that is deliberate. A record of completed work is pleasant and tells you nothing. A record that shows four projects stopped at the same stage tells you something specific about the stage, the pattern, or the time of year, and that is worth knowing before starting a fifth.
The forms on this page
- Reading challenge. A list of books read is a record. A challenge with prompts is a reason to read something you would not have picked, which is the part people actually enjoy.
- Film log. Written the same evening, a single line is worth more than a paragraph written a month later, which is why the row is short.
- Garden planner. Planning on squared paper stops the commonest mistake in a vegetable bed, which is planting at the spacing on the packet and discovering in July that it meant it.
- Yarn inventory. Dye lot is the field everyone leaves out and then needs. Two balls of the same shade from different lots do not match, and it only shows once the piece is knitted.
- Craft inventory. Most craft spending is on something already in a box in the loft. A list is cheaper than the second one.
- Project tracker. The honest column is the last one. A tracker that only records finished projects tells you nothing about why the other nine stopped.
Related printables
The reading log is the simpler daily version for children, the planner and habit tracker cover the day-to-day, and graph paper gives you a bigger squared sheet if a garden plan needs more room than this one.
Answers