Getting Organized II: On the Sagas

Yes, there is more than one 🙂

After my first meta-ish post on organization I got some good feed back from MrsKristyHoll, who thought my project count wouldn’t be accurate if I didn’t include all my long term projects but that I should make said projects their own category. Not being one to turn down sage advice, I now have a page dedicated to my UFO’s and another to my long term projects, or Sagas.

As I was getting the page together I realized the wisdom of having the Mood Scarf and Sock It To Me Thursday as their own category. Both are dramatically different from my UFO’s as well as each other. The Mood Scarf is pretty straight forward, it’s one project that takes place over the course of a year and I update on time-based milestones. Sock It To Me Thursday is a longer term thing that has multiple parts in the way of various sock patterns and challenges. This Saga’s write up is still a work in progress but I wanted to at least get started.  Writing all this out gave me a good reality check in terms of how much time I have to take on any other projects and this lead to my culling both my Ravelry and Pinterest queues to half the size.

Do not adjust your screen or lenses, you read that correctly. I found out that I had projects on both queues and so I consolidated as well as purged. Granted, my Ravelry favorites are a mess but my Pinterest boards are down to about 70 pins total and that’s only because I couldn’t save the patterns onto my messy bookmarks folder just yet. Reading some of the knitting blogs on here, I’ve been made aware that Pinterest is not the most ethical way to keep my projects organized and I’ll be phasing it out of use in the next year. In this time, I’ll also be getting my Ravelry account in order so I that the amount of projects does not exceed the hours in my approximate life time 😉

So some of you may be wondering what all the fuss is. It isn’t like having a huge queue is caloric or anything and what if I need said pattern for a particular technique or set of instructions?

It really is just about keeping things manageable. If I have to look through 3000 pins before I can find what I need, I may as well have started looking from scratch. I’d rather use all that time and energy to knit. And barring a massive solar flare that takes out the internet as we know it, said pins/patterns etc will still be there in some way shape or form. Besides, I’m pretty sure that if a massive solar flare happens, I’ll have bigger things to worry about than a specific pattern. Also, as I become more experienced, I think I’ll start coming up with my own patterns and I’d like to feel open to try them out without feeling like I’m slacking on my queue. And finally, the last most practical reason, is that this way, I wont be tempted to get the perfect yarn for project #50 when I’m still at project #10. My stash isn’t huge, but I’m pretty sure I have the yarn for project #20 as is and I need those square centimeters.

Why? Well, it’s still kind of new in my head and thus hard to explain (I know, this is my third attempt), but after I tried on my first completed sock, I began to wonder what it would be like to have more of my clothes fit as perfectly as that sock. I’ve never really been into shopping for clothes because finding something that was made for a woman with an Oakland booty, etc is a serious challenge, and more recently, as I’ve become aware of how unethical and unsustainable fast fashion is, I’m thinking it might be a sign to become more involved in what I wear. Hence, I’ll need those square centimeters to keep my larger projects.

I’m not sure what that looks like right now. I don’t sew yet, though the fact that I recently inherited a machine will change that come November. In the mean time, however, I intend to get ethical and sustainable clothing when I need to replace things and knit/crochet as much as possible when it comes to socks and tops. We’ll see what happens, but after a bit of research on both fronts, I feel pretty optimistic.