I've been sewing since I was 11 years old and seriously collecting patterns since my 20's. That's 44 years of sewing and over 35 years of collecting. At one point in my 30's, I took every pattern I had put them in manilla letter sized folders, labelled them and put them into legal sized banker boxes. Then I put the pattern envelopes in plastic sleeves. The sleeves were placed in black binders and for years I used this system.
I had hundreds of patterns stored this way. Whenever a new pattern was purchased, I added it to the collection. However, this system became cumbersome to move from place to place and I slowly stopped using it. Then the pattern boxes were stashed in storage places and the backs of closets. I rarely touched them...finally my daughter in an act of defiance, grace or better acceptance than myself tossed the lot in the garbage.
That did hurt and I was angry for a minute until I came to my senses. I hadn't touched those patterns in at least a decade. Acceptance came but I do regret that they hadn't been donated because honestly I was never going to eBay them or open an Etsy store to sell them. My daughter's rationale, I still owned hundreds of patterns and they all currently reside in the sewing cave.
Honestly I've cut way back on my pattern purchasing because if I sew 50 pieces a year, more than half are from TNT patterns, the next 30-40% is from a variation of one of my TNT patterns so maybe 5-6 new patterns are actually sewn every year. I'm buying way more patterns than I sew now.
Thankfully I've invested in storage space in the sewing cave so most of the patterns are stored and easily accessible. I have only one troublesome area...where new patterns are presently being
"dumped" upon their arrival in the cave. But this drop off place is also helping me to realize that I need to sew more from the stashed patterns and be more judicious with my purchasing.