2kcbwday3: Tidy Mind, Tidy Stitches

This is my third post for Knitting Blog Week, the topic of which is: how do you keep your knitting paraphernalia and projects organised?

Well, that’s a question with a long answer on this end! I have multiple tools that range from paper and pen, to physical organisation tools, to the digital. I’ll go through everything now.

Physical yarn stash:

This is not organised in any way whatsoever: not by colour, nor weight, nor material. I made some room in a drawer one evening and shoved as many balls in there as I could, then I threw the rest into a couple of wicker baskets I own. I didn’t even group them by intended upcoming project. I like this approach, though. It gives me freedom in choosing my next project when the time is right. Will I choose by yarn? By colour? By pattern? What time of year will it be, and how long do I suspect it will take to finish said project, and will either of those factors affect my choice?

Virtual yarn stash:
As you may have already guessed from previous posts, I’m a huge fan of Ravelry. It is so magnificently useful in the world of knitting, where you may be travelling but interested in local knitting organisations or yarn shops or types of yarns that may be available, and you want to look up any of this information for that area – you just log in and it’s at your fingertips. A Wikipedia of knitting, in a way. It’s wonderful. I can’t imagine knitting in any other time than now. I saw a talk at VKLive, I will have to consult my notes for who, but he spoke on Victorian knitting and the patterns they used back then and such. It was marvellously vague back then – so vague, all you can do is wonder how anyone successfully knit anything – well, the skill must have been passed down aurally, with very specific instruction and in great detail, prior to mass produced communication. It’s fascinating. In any case, I use Ravelry’s marevellous organisational capabilities to document and keep track of my yarn. The only thing I’m struggling with is this – you can’t indicate on here that you’ve used up a certain yarn. So you have to either mentally note this, or keep track of it elsewhere. You could delete the yarn, but what if you want to refer back to it later – double-check whether you’ve had this particular variant before or not, and what you thought of it, etc. In any case, I’m more organised on Ravelry than I would be anywhere else, and I adore how everything links back into their different databases (from yarns to patterns to designers to knitters to forums…) so you can always look stuff up or refer back to stuff really easily.

Needles:
The only way I can keep track of what needles I own is through Ravelry. I love this feature. I think I’ve seen it on a couple of iPhone Apps, but most of those are pay-only, and while I love the convenience of having such apps on my iPod Touch, to be perfectly honest, it’s much easier to use a mouse, keyboard and large screen to navigate through adding my needles and reviewing what I have available. The only time it would come in handy would be if it could connect to the internet (being on the iPod Touch and not the iPhone, wi-fi has to be available to me in order for this to work, or else it could show the previous load’s results if wi-fi is not available), look up my needle db on Ravelry and feed me back the info without me having to enter it a second time into a tiny-screened App interface…

Patterns – it goes without saying, Ravelry is the only place to go for patterns that exist in the world. Google can’t compare. I just hope everyone has heard of it and submitted any patterns they may know of that haven’t been published or haven’t been published *lately* (vintage patterns, so cool!!). It’s both comforting and fascinating that we have this global brain to hook into for knowledge like this. It doesn’t matter what topic it is – if you’re geeky enough about it, you’ll find the resources you need to explore it in detail, and you’ll explore everything you can possibly find about it, and in so doing become some sort of mini-expert in the interest.

Anywho… I think I’ve spent too much time writing about knitting, and not enough time knitting this week. So, I’m leaving it at that. Cheers!
Knitting Blog Week Series: Post 1 · Post 2 · Post 3 · Post 4 · Post 5 · Post 6 · Post 7