Friday, May 17, 2013

Administering your knitting

When you think of how long it takes to plan to make stuff, and then make it, and then 'finish' it, it seems like a hardship to have to track it, too.


Still: so useful to have some sort of record, if only to speed up the next planning stage!  Oh the irony of that old saw, 'take time to make time.'

Journals like the ones pictured here are great because they are private, and on paper, and acknowledge only what you tell them - and even then, they will keep your secrets.

If you tell them about every bit of yarn you ever bought, they won't lord over you the fact that you still haven't knit it when you buy more, because the pages are too small to hold all of that information in one page, which is to say the page you are looking at right now.

And they won't tally a 'total' at the top of that page either, in case you thought you could skip over scrolling all the way down to see the true horror of your shopping misdeeds.

Similarly, a paper journal won't bother you about those projects you started with so much enthusiasm and then got distracted away from when you ran into trouble.  That information falls back to an earlier page and doesn't nag you from the top of the list.

Of course, you could just not tell the journal anything, but then you're back to trying to remember what needles worked with what yarn, so... yeah.  Journals are good.

The Ravelry Project Page

When life is - well, what passes for easy, I like to keep my Ravelry project page all up to date, because it's telling me good news.  But when things are busy, I don't have time to go uploading all those pictures, and... meh, it feels like too much work.

Then when I do take the time, remembering how useful it is to have those records, it's: GAAAAAH! because I don't know where to look for the photo files now, and I forgot to upload that yarn to my stash which means extra minutes I didn't plan for, and so on.  And then I do it anyway, because: glutton for punishment.

Using Avoidance Time for Administration

While avoiding casting on the mystery shawl last week (I picked yarn, but I hadn't decided on a needle size, and I didn't feel emotionally prepared to make the sort of commitment that this choice would involve) I updated my Ravelry project page.

And it was (and, I believe, still is) a bit messy.  Six projects outstanding! not counting the two sweaters languishing in the cupboard on what is apparently an indefinite hiatus (I moved those to Snooze, so as not to have to look at them being sadly neglected every time I visit.)

I guess a good thing about tracking progress electronically is that you can see how little you have left to finish a project that maybe fell off  your radar.  Just getting it off the top line of those in-progress pieces becomes a desirable goal, and forces you to keep accomplishing more.

Unless you have to rip out a lot of sock to reknit it, in which case that tantalizing progress note of what was, and if only, is just torture.

Oh well.

How about you?  Do you track or are you just spontaneous?

And are you going to have a fabulous weekend?  I sure hope so!  See you Monday (but probably late, because it's a holiday here and I am so going to be sleeping in.)

ps I took better pictures of the new knitting basket.


It totally looks like a sideways knit, right?  and check out the pretty shaping for the handles at the sides:


Definitely, a knitting basket.

1 comment:

Trish said...

I track everything on Rav. Although, when I get really busy, I've noticed that I don't update as much, and I tend to have the projects collect. Kind of like right now, when I have something like 8 current projects - and that's not including the one I started yesterday because the weather was so nice. Of course, the upside to that is that when I do finally get my ducks in a row, all of sudden my projects get finished at astonishingly fast speeds!