Sketching vs. Beading

In my imagination I have notebooks filled with lovely sketches of the beadwork I intend to bead.  They are all full, match and are arranged in order of my beading history.

In reality, they are all mis matched (I'm always trying to find the perfect one!) but I do have a large number of moleskine brand with unlined pages.  My sketches are little bits of line drawings that serve to suggest to me whatever my design vision is.  My sketches are in no way pretty and my handwriting is worse!  I start out trying to be neat……perhaps this will be my solution.

A group I belong to has just set down a design challenge to sketch first and bead second which is not my typical design process.  My notebook arrives next week and I'm going to give it a try.

 Lynn Firth of Stitchncraft shared her love of Evernote with me, I decided to embrace it as a great organizational tool.  I only travel with phone and iPad these days.  My desktop iMac is a tad too large and I no longer have a laptop computer.   I can accomplish most of what I want to on the iPad. Evernote has allowed me to track all sorts of documents together in one place.  I send important emails to my evernote email account or cc myself when answering and I have a record.  I've organized my notebooks with one for teaching, one for the airstream, one for portfolios of recent work, one for travel, etc.  

Evernote has teamed up with Moleskine to provide a sketchbook which can be photographed with the iPad and become a digitally editable document in Evernote or PenUltimate.  I'm still learning how these all work together, but I'm hopeful this will be a great tool for designing or at the least for taking design notes while stitching.

Do you have any good Evernote tips for me?  I'm still learning!