Crafting in the World

FIRST OF ALL: If you live in Austin, you should know that Amy’s Ice Cream is making peppermint bark. If you buy a box of it (it’s small), they will then kindly let you make your bark into a crush’n, which they will then add to your scoop or pint of ice cream. I recommend dark chocolate. It is FABULOUS. If you don’t live in Austin, my apologies. You should visit and I will take you there.

Moving right along …

Although sometimes it seems crafters are off in their own little world, it’s not really true. Consider ICD-9 codes (that’s International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems to you). These are the codes doctors assign our charts to tell health insurance companies about what they’ve diagnosed us with. Yes, I DO work in a medical clinic. But check out this one:

E0.00 Injury or illness due to knitting and crochet.

Yes, it does exist. We have our own diagnosis! I had fun thinking about what sorts of things might fall under this diagnosis code. Are people being stabbed with knitting needles? Blindness from a poor color combination choice? Development of obsessive-compulsive disorder due to inability to put down the hook? Suffocation under yarn stashes that got out of hand? More likely repetitive stress injury or maybe intracranial injury, but it’s interesting to imagine.

Then, earlier today I was on New Yorker Jeffrey Zeldman’s website looking into Blue Beanie Day – which is a day for people to show support for web standards. It was the webmaster in me going there, but imagine my surprise when I was reading through the comments and the crafter side of me saw this:

OMG! The Knitting Nest is a south Austin LYS that I go to. Neat! So then I clicked on that bit.ly ink and  saw this.

The interwebs make it such a small world.

Flower Death What?

(mostly) Wordless Wednesdays presents:

DEATH SHED … with flower! Yeah, I don’t understand either. Courtesy of my neighborhood.

Projects on the Web

Tech Stuff Monday – The other day I was thinking about what projects to post in my blog for my “projects in my queue” day. That got me to  thinking about how I find and catalog projects when I see them.  For example, I got a newsletter from Lion Brand with some crochet vegetables I was thinking about making – I might be able to do that soon. Then I saw something in my RSS feed for some furniture that I wanted to make (that’s probably not going to happen anytime soon). So what do I do to save those links?

I don’t know if other creative people collect patterns, projects, materials and ideas like this, or how they manage it.  I seem to always have an information overload – and the presence of that phrase in the news media leads me to believe I’m not the only one.  So I thought I’d share some of the ways that I manage my ever-increasing library of crafty-arty links. There are a million possibilities, this is what I chose.  (Note: the epic logo graphic to the right is from Flickr user Ludwig Gatzke.)

Tutorials and Materials

• Delicious: I save lots and lots of things to Delicious, and in fact use it more than any of the other sites in keeping track of web links. I have three primary uses for it:  (1) saving links to places to get materials, (2) a place to stash online tutorials (i.e. not entire projects) and (3) to save ideasI want to share on Crafter by Night.  If you look at the bottom of this website you’ll see a list of links that automatically is generated by certain of my Delicious tags.
• Wish Lists: I use the Wish List feature of the Blick Art catalog to remember art supplies I wanted to get. Sometimes I don’t get them there, but the convenience of the feature is nice.  I also use Amazon to make wish lists of craft books I’m interested in.
• I think the invention of the RSS feed has made my life (a) livable and (b) completely overloaded with information. The links I find there feed into a lot of these things I’m mentioning today, but when I’m first going through them if I think I want to save it for later review, then I either just Star them through Google Reader (Seems like Google owns my life), or click the Instapaper bookmarklet to save it to read later.

Crochet Projects

• Ravelry: No project management list for the yarn arts would be complete without a mention of Casey and Jess’ brilliant knit/crochet/spinning/weaving project masterpiece. I was an early adopter. I don’t use it as fully as I might, but I do use the possible projects queue, and I keep track of the progress of my projects there, and use it to combine my Flickr photos, blog posts and then project summaries.

Sewing Projects

• Evernote:  I use this to catalog sewing patterns. This web program allows me to “clip” pictures – of entire websites, screenshots, pieces of text, my own notes. Plus I can classify things.  I keep an offline notebook of clippings on which I make notes and sketches. I’m sort of trying to make Evernote into a way to do the same thing digitally for sewing patterns. I can’t do sketches the same way, but I can put together a nice visual catalog of sewing projects I’m interested in.  It has an iPhone app for convenience.

Recipes

• I almost always do one of two things with recipes I see.  I get a lot of my recipes online from All Recipes and Epicurious. I mentioned that I use the Epicurious iPhone application.  Both of these websites have online recipe boxes and shopping lists to which you can add the recipes you like.  The other option for blog recipes, etc. is that I print and save them in my offline recipe box, but I may begin to use Delicious for these types of recipes.

Projects & Miscellany

• I track things I want to buy on Etsy through the favorite items, sellers, etc. ability in my account.  That also feeds in here to my blog for the side bar.
• Flickr’s Favorite Photo feature lets me remember projects that I like there, or people that I’m interested in, and their Groups gives me access to a wide range of things I wouldn’t otherwise come across.  And of course I use Flickr on this here blog quite a lot.