Winding Down, Gearing Up

I'm tired, you guys...
today I weeded 20% of our front yard with a dinner fork.

The ongoing saga of Project Needles has been trucking along during HPKCHC break month and I've been hatching plans for the next three months (including thoughts about Knitting & Crochet Blog Week).  For the past five "terms" (a year.5 in real life), I've been on blog staff for Ravenclaw House; this term marks a break for the blog and brings a new staff position, for myself and for Ravenclaw:  
Spreadsheet Sorceress!!  I am indeed a nerd among nerds, folks.

April's hearts are finished a couple of days early:

Sweetie❤KNIT❤Heart [Rav] designed by Jackie Loewen

and I've been messing around with some more yarn dyeing... more on that soon!  It's officially spring for realsies, you guys!

Project Needles: Classification

or, How I Assigned Call Numbers to My Knitting Needles

A Librarian's Tale

If the titles did not trigger red flags,
you have now been officially warned: NERD ALERT.

After completing a survey of priorities for the user population (in this case, just me), portability will factor into the storage of the collection, with a minimum of repackaging and an option for decentralization (AKA I will continue to keep my needles in two specific locations for convenience, and relabeling all my needles would be super insane).

Crafting equipment comes with its own controlled vocabulary, so it's a natural step to use this vocabulary when creating an organization hierarchy for knitting needles... things like:

• Needle size: US sizes for user comfort
• Needle type: circular, double pointed, straight
• Needle length: 6", 8", 16", etc.
• Needle material: metal, wood, bamboo, plastic, etc.

can translate to a call number for relatively easy recognition of the object:

In my opinion (and I may be the only one hanging out in this paragraph -- hello, brave souls who are still reading!), this structure can be easily extended, so that no matter how large this specific collection gets, the chances of running out of unique identifiers is slim.  I will not be assigning Cutter numbers! (cataloging humor, stop me plz)

How a user population can use these assigned call numbers for search and retrieval is its own issue.  I may need to get a whiteboard...

**This post is dedicated to my husband; he met me before grad school and he's stayed with me, even though I talk like this now.**

Project Needles: Inventory

We have reached The Reckoning.

Step 1: print out handy-dandy list of knitting needles and crochet hooks already input in Ravelry.
Step 2: resist urge to procrastinate with data (SCATTER PLOT!)
Step 3: profit  fail miserably at Step 2.
Step 4: attempt to find the listed equipment anywhere in my house.

for funsies wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

After the first pass, there are four pairs of needles that I have no idea where they are AND four pairs of needles that I actually need to add to Ravelry for a full account of the facts.

The labelled resealable bags are leftovers from my old system of organization.  Notice that there are no bags for needles sized smaller than US5 -- at that time, I didn't own any AND I didn't anticipate falling in love with finer yarn and lace knitting!

All the straight needles in my collection were added prior to 2006, I believe.  Why stop buying straight needles?  Several reasons:

• they only work for flat knitting, which limits their reuse
• projects get heavier as they go along, and it's easier on the joints to keep the bulk of a project centralized (on a cable, for example) rather than side-to-side shifting
• I drop things.  A lot.  Drop a needle attached to a cable, it goes nowhere! Drop a straight needle--
  CLANG clink clink click-click-click roll.

Now to track down those missing needles... time to comb through the long-term Works In Progress.

Mot-less Monday: A Touch of Sparkle

Merrily We Roll Along

The sun is so bright this morning, I had to stand in its way just to get a clear shot of April's hearts so far.

I've got lots of non-knitting plans this weekend, but I realized that you haven't seen much (any?) of the progress I've made on the second Maple Leaf shawl:

It's about 80% done and I'm trying to weave in the ends as I go.  With all the breaking and reattaching involved in creating the corners, there are so. many. ends and it gets a little tricky with laceweight at this ethereal gauge.

Okay, yay then!  Off to sing now, bye!

Project Needles: This Title's a Little Corny

Yesterday Eskimimi, creator of Knit & Crochet Blog Week, announced the dates for 2014 and it was just the kick in the pants I needed to start talking again.  Last year I set some goals for myself (even followed through with some) and now we're back to it: Project Needles!

It's been 11-ish months since the last time I talked about Project Needles on the blog, but don't think I've been lazy since that time.  There has been a whole lot of thinking, let me tell you.  Such thinking, you guys.  About storage and whatnot.  Really!

Behold, some 1-gallon Garrett's Popcorn tins, left from the winter holidays, now empty of their original contents:

Before you judge me, they were gifts, okay?  And yes, there are more of them, thank you so much for pointing that out I thought we were friends gosh.

They look like paint cans, only super classy, and more importantly: popcorn cans often come with dividers to separate different flavors of deliciousness in one tin.  These did not (Chicago mix FTW!), but the idea was still planted in this brain of mine.  So the thought is: the dividers I make would be movable for additions etc., I could store each needle size separately while keeping like sizes near each other (oh yeah, I decided that was a priority, keeping all size US7s together regardless of needle type), and the handles make them infinitely portable.

Opinions?  I'm still looking for the proper way to fully clean out cheese-ish residue.