something completely different today
the magic of popcorn popping time.
It takes three and a half minutes to pop a bag of “Pop Secret’s Movie Theater Butter Popcorn.” Three and a half minutes of standing in the kitchen. Surprisingly enough three and a half minutes is enough time to do a lot of things.
It’s enough time to put the clean dishes away. Or clean the dirty dishes in the sink.
It’s enough time to put away a bag of groceries. Or toss last night’s pizza box.
It’s enough time to refill the soap dispenser, take the garbage to the chute, or wash the counter.
The key of course being “or.” There’s not enough time to do all of them. Just one of them.
And when the microwave beeps, you go on your merry way. With popcorn.
The magic of popcorn-popping-time is also the magic of tea-water-boiling-time, and coffee-pot-brewing-time. The microwave beeps, the tea kettle whistles, or the coffee pot clicks, and you go on your merry way. With popcorn, or tea, or coffee.
movie marathons don’t hurt knitting progress
I’m always working on some project or another, and most weeks I talk about what I’m working on Wednesdays as part of Tami’s WIP Wednesday project. You can see past WIP Wednesdays … right this way.
When I’m working on a long project or a semi-monotonous* project, I get disheartened when it gets harder to see progress. And I bet I’m not the only one, right?
*not necessarily monotonous in a bad way, but a project that is not snap of the fingers instant, and involves lots of one simple stitch (such as garter stitch shawls).
I use a couple tricks to keep myself motivated, the easiest and most reliable one being to keep visual track of my progress using row markers.
It’s really simple and very motivating.
So if I’m feeling unmotivated or trying to knit fast on a deadline, when I sit down to knit I’ll place a row marker in the row I’m starting on. This way as I knit, I know exactly where I started and as I knit I try to run away from the marker.
The next day, I’ll place a new row marker in the row I’m starting on, and try to knit more than I did the day before. (Of course, some days I knit less, but it’s only knitting, so it’s all good.)
Combining this with continually shortening rows is awesome, because it makes you feel super speedy.
(Movie marathons also help.)
This was part of Tami’s WIP Wednesday project. If you’d like more WIP Wednesday posts, from other bloggers, visit Tami’s blog.
even complicated projects usually start simply
Unfortunately complicated projects don’t generally fall out of your brain fully formed.
It usually starts with an outline, or a sketch, a rough approximation. There’s a reason painters sketch, novelists outline, and knitters swatch.
Sketches, outlines and swatches are all places to play and experiment, to solve problems and work out contingencies, with low expectations, and little investment.
I’ve talked about my love affair with swatching before, but I also “sketch” for many of my knitting design projects.
I open up my charting software and draw out what I want the design to look like, using yarn-overs and decreases, kind of like a proto-chart . Then I refine and tweak, refine and tweak, until I’m happy with the chart, and I start knitting. (This tweaking is what turns the initial sketch into the final chart.)
This process of sketching, then tweaking and refining, isn’t just for knitwear or pattern designing. The execution is different, but the process is the same.
For example, the map for Shawl Geometry III, started as hand drawn sketches on a piece of paper. Actually, the entire book started as handwritten scribbles on graph paper.
Which then turned into hand drawn scribbled schematics on top of typed text.
The complete map started as kind of a total mess. But drawing these hand messy maps served the purpose of getting the idea out of my head and onto paper.
Getting something out of my head is the first step towards being able to put an idea down and walking away. Walking away from an idea allows your brain to quietly munch and mull on all of the information you have, and come up with creative solutions to whatever problem you’re running into.
It turned out that the key to creating this map, was to have a central hub around the square and the right triangle, then have all of the longer paths looping around the outside of this central hub.
So if you look at the map closely, you’ll see that the center out square, and the right triangle (the two most interconnected shapes) are right at the center of the map, with half a dozen lines leading away from either of them.
Then if you look at the outsides of the map, you’ll see that’s where the shapes that are connected to two or three other shapes are, such as the crescents, and the half circles.
This rather simple idea of a hub, with longer paths looping around the outside, meant that I could go into illustrator and sketch out the final version of the map. Other than lots of small annoying tweaks* here and there, that was it.
*the tweaks that are a total pain in the butt to do, but that make the final product look so much better. Details matter.
It’s a crazy complicated map. That started as some pen scribbles.
Big complicated projects usually involve:
an idea
a sketch/outline/draft/plan/swatch
messing about with said sketch/outline/draft/plan/swatch
a period of thinking about anything else a.k.a. brain munching time
a final draft/sketch
rearranging
tweaking
stupid annoying tweaking
stop tweaking (it will never be perfect, but at some point it will be damn good)
ta-da! a finished a big complicated project. yay you!
What crazy project are you working on? Or are thinking about embarking on?
Announce! Announce! You can get Shawl Geometry III (the book that explains the map) here.
