Tag: organizing crochet

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Organize Your Patterns and two New Patterns

Patterns, Patterns- there are so many good patterns on the internet, how do you organize your patterns? How do you store your patterns or keep track of good crochet patterns, crochet ideas or even  patterns in process?

Pinterest

How can you organize your crochet pattern links? Pinterest is an excellent storage place for internet links and you get a great visual of each pattern as you open the board.  Quite frankly, it is my favorite place to keep track of patterns or patterns that spark new ideas for my projects.  Make a secret board and you will have a wonderful place to keep patterns for gifts and ideas of things to crochet for friends and family. Filtering through all the ideas is easy and you can delete or add at will and no one can see what you are thinking about.

You can also use your bookmarks function on your computer. Mine is so cluttered right now that I am not sure which project is in which link. Organizing these links into different files would be helpful.

Composition book

If you prefer an old school approach, then a composition book or binder is a great way to keep track of ideas that you come across. You can even note down any web addresses that you come across. When the kids finished their schooling, we had an overwhelming amount of unused or partially used school supplies. I cut out the old pages, slap a label on the cover and get started.

They are handy and have hard back covers. Small enough to fit in my project bags and lightweight enough to carry everywhere. The sticky tabs and sticky notes work great as labels and make it easy to find the new information. Leave the first 4 pages blank for a table of contents.

How do you organize your patterns

Tape in yarn labels and color ideas, gauge, stripe samples, drawings, and any other information in the creation of a pattern, or item.

How do you organize your patterns   How do you organize your patterns   How do you organize your patterns   How do you organize your patterns   How do you organize your patterns

You need to do this, it will be such a help to you. How many times do you think back and wonder what kind of yarn, brand or color did you crochet that hat out of? If it is written down you can flip back and see exactly what you did and how you did it.

www.Ravelry.com does this for you online but sometimes you want to keep things secret from nosy friends, family or even strangers. I know that these two ideas will help you organize your patterns and keep track of your projects!

New Patterns

Here are two new patterns coming out in the shops this week. They are very similar in pattern so don’t be surprised when you buy them. The Red Eyelet Blanket is a bit easier than the Purple Eyelet Blanket. There is also the Eyelet Blanket bundle which includes the Baby Eyelet Blanket pattern. The Red and the Purple Blanket use chunky yarns and crochet up so quickly that you can probably finish 1 if not both between now and Christmas!

      

There are so many great projects on the horizon. Next week there is the free tutorial coming out to help you use many of your scrap yarns! I love to use up yarn scraps and make space for new skeins. I can’t wait to show you.

Talk to you later,

Karen

P.S. How do you organize your patterns? Let me know, I am always looking for a better way to organize.

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Get Yourselves Organized!

How do you get yourselves organized? I use a variety of organizational methods to keep myself organized, but first one of my favorite movie clips.

This movie clip has one of my favorite lines “Get yourselves organized down there”. Sheep on a motorcycle doing acrobatics.  I often hear “Get yourselves organized” in Wallace’s voice while I am working in the studio. It must be something to do with the sheep = yarn thing.

The design idea can start with the flash of an idea, a color theory carried over from another textile, or an outgrowth of another crochet blanket, a photo off of instagram. Keeping track of ideas has been difficult. Brief flashes of insight are difficult to write down on paper and keep. Visual ideas are even more difficult.

Recently, I have been working hard to write down and keep these ideas trapped and in my mind. Often I will draw out an afghan plan. I keep these in a notebook, composition book (link) or binder. place where ideas sit and incubate until they are ready to hatch. The incubator is a compilation of different places. It is a little bit secret Pinterest board, a little bit composition book and binder combination.

Many times the yarn itself tells me how to use them in a pattern, I will do some color play with the yarn to get an idea of how it will look when it is finished.

Get Yourselves Organized
Get Yourselves Organized

If it is a fabric that has given me an idea for color striping, I will take a photo or print out a photo of the color stripes. I will use this photo as a basis for my afghan, adding colors and taking colors away until it is truly a design of my own.  This is what I am doing in the photos up above.

Get Yourselves Organized

It can also look like this.

www.chocolatedogstudio.com

Here I am doing a little math to see how many squares I need for an afghan I am working on.

or even this

Get Yourselves Organized

Ideas often sit in my scrap yarn bucket just waiting for the right time.

I work hard at not copying another’s design work. It is difficult with the media bombardment to keep your work original. There are so many avenues to search out patterns and to generate new ideas. As a crochet designer, I feel it is important to be as original as I can be and not knowingly copy another’s design work.

Talk to you later,

Karen

How is your WIP (work in progress) going?

Send me some photos via instagram… just tag me in the photo and I will pop by and comment.