Wind it up

Recently I've been in one of those moods where I feel like I need to pause and get organized before I can accomplish anything. I kind of want to knit, or crochet, or work on my photo albums, but then I get aggravated because I'm trying to work from a tangled skein or find just the right scrap of paper in the middle of a messy heap. For my photo album supplies, I recently ordered some paper organizers that were a little pricey, but hopefully will make my life easier. And for my yarn:

Yesterday, all I wanted to do was tidy up my leftover odds and ends. Most of these were in hand-wound balls already, but I decided they would be easier to use if I rewound them as center-pull balls. Plus, it's a bit better for the yarn, since it's not under as much tension that way. I found this tutorial, and spent my afternoon and evening winding yarn around a toilet paper tube. And now I feel much better about everything.

The real inspiration for this exercise was that I want to start some new projects, and none of the yarn for them is wound yet. I don't feel ready yet to invest in a swift and ball winder, and I wanted to try out hand-wound center-pull skeins, so I practiced first... on everything. Now I want to actually start those projects, but the yarn still isn't wound, and I'm a little tired of winding at this point. Oops.

Organizing!: Ravelry stash

I adore Ravelry for many reasons, not least of which is the insane levels of organization it encourages. Quite a while ago, I photographed and cataloged my entire yarn stash, and I've done a pretty good job of keeping it updated. If you link to yarn that's in your stash when you create a project, then Ravelry will keep track of how much of that yarn you have left based on your project's yardage (if you enter it), and link to any projects that used that yarn on the yarn's page. I love looking at the page for one of my skeins and seeing all the projects I've made with it, especially my lovely acrylic that I used for multiple amigurumi (and still haven't used up, ugh).

One thing that bothered me, though, is that I didn't have an accurate way of measuring how much yarn I had used in my projects, and how much yarn I had left in my stash. So my stash page on Ravelry was good for keeping track of the yarn I own, but it wasn't actually a good representation of how much I really had.

Then, I got a kitchen scale for Christmas!

Jen of the Commuter Knitter podcast mentioned recently that she has been weighing her projects and using that to keep her Ravelry stash up-to-date, so I was inspired to spend my Saturday afternoon doing the same thing. I tracked down all of my projects that I haven't given away, starting way back with a crocheted bag from 2008, and weighed them. Then, based on Ravelry's data about how many grams are in a skein of the yarn I had used, I calculated how many skeins my project had taken. Now, many of my project pages have accurate yardage on them! Yayyy! And, I know almost exactly how much yarn I have left over from those projects in my stash! Yayyy!

Many of my acrylic skeins unfortunately can't benefit from the same automagic updating, because I used them for multiple amigurumi. I can't weigh those, because they have been given away, they use yarn from multiple skeins, and/or they're stuffed so I can't weigh the yarn alone. So, I just weighed the remnants that are left in my stash, and calculated how much of a skein I have of those. I put that amount into Ravelry as my "amount stashed," which isn't exactly how it's supposed to work - ideally, you start with the number of whole skeins you originally had, keep track of how much you use in your projects, and Ravelry calculates your current amount stashed from there. The way I'm doing it for my acrylic partial skeins, I'll have to manually update it if I use some of that yarn. Not a big deal, though.

Now that I have a pretty exact idea of how many yards I have of all my yarn, I can do some advanced searches on Ravelry for projects that will use up x amount of y weight yarn! Even though working from my stash doesn't inspire near as much excitement as buying new yarn, I had so much fun last night looking for patterns I can use. I'm linking to possibilities in the notes section of each yarn's page, so I'll remember them when I decide it's time to use some stash. I love Ravelry.

Organizing!: Pinterest

I love organizing. I will happily organize almost anything, whether said things belong to me or not. I also get a kick out of organizing non-tangible things, like the files on my computer and, especially these days, the many, many bookmarking and sharing sites I use. Since I've been active on Pinterest for more than a year now and hadn't done an organizing sweep on there yet, I decided it was time. Luckily I have only a few hundred pins, not thousands, so this wasn't too daunting a task.

Pinterest's somewhat difficult relationship with issues of credit and copyright has made me a little uneasy from the beginning, but since pretty much everyone else was just happily pinning and repinning without worrying too much about it, I went along with it. A large part of my recent organizing, though, was tracking down and giving credit to original creators. It's really not hard, and I think it's the right thing to do.

So, what I did was:

• For each pin, I checked the link to make sure that it still worked, and that it went to the page where that content or image was originally posted. If you spend much time trying to get to actual websites from Pinterest, you can probably guess how this went.
• If the pin didn't link to a "real" website (if it just went to an image search result, or an arbitrary page of a tumblr, or something like that), I tracked down the site that the content originally came from. The easiest way to do this is to use Google Image Search:

• Click on the little camera icon in the right side of the search bar, and you can paste in the image's URL. Then Google will search for that picture and return websites that have the same or similar images on it. When the top page result is somebody's Flickr account, as in this example [edit: I just noticed that the link actually is to someone's Flickr favorites, but from there it's easy to get back to the original photo], then I could be pretty sure I had found the original creator. Sometimes it was a little more tricky, but usually either going to the website that hosted the largest version of the image I was looking for, or to the oldest website, was successful.
• Then, once I had found the original website, I edited that pin and changed the website to the link I had found. In some cases, I just deleted my old pin and created a new one with the correct link.
• There were a few times that I just couldn't find an original creator. In those cases, I tried to at least find their name to put in the pin's description, or to change the link to the earliest source for that content that I could find.
• There were also a few pins where I found the original creator's Flickr page, but they had not enabled pinning their photos. In those cases, I deleted my pin. 

But I did not stop here! Another bad Pinterest habit I've fallen into is just leaving whatever description happens to be on the pin when I repin it to one of my boards. A lot of people do this, leading to some bizarre situations if you assume that the description on the pin is what your friend actually had to say about it. I do a lot of my Pinterest browsing on my iPad, so it's much easier to just repin and not type in a new description of my own, but it was starting to bother me that so many of the descriptions on my pins were things I would never actually say! So, I went through and fixed that too.

Then, just to do a little more tidying, I unfollowed a few boards that my contacts pin to. I'm not that interested in elementary education, paleo diets, fitness (sadly), crafts for toddlers, or some of the other things my friends are into, so I just unfollowed those boards. Much better! Now my pins are all, to the best of my ability, correctly attributed, and they have my own comments on them, and my main feed is mostly just stuff I actually want to see. Ahh, organization.