I am a notebook addict, as I might have mentioned. A pencil and paper kind of girl. Diaries, planners, sketchbooks, logbooks of all sorts (books, wines …) were always an integral part of my life. I love a written record, and how visceral it is to flip back through one. Of course, in the digital age, my habits have shifted. I’ve used a web-based to-do system instead of a paper planner since around 2009; converted my editorial calendar into a spreadsheet in 2014; and have a solid 11 years of ephemera of every kind clipped into Evernote. PDFs, images, order confirmations, screengrabs, flight itineraries, random notes to self, you name it — if I need to search for it someday, or access it anywhere from any device, into Evernote it goes. I’m extremely organized and systematized. Yet somehow, where knitting is concerned — from when I learned in 2011 until the start of this year — my record-keeping has been a giant mess.
As I’m knitting anything, I always have notes on paper. I highlight, annotate and scribble in the margins of printed-out pattern PDFs. I have two Knitters Graph Paper Journals full of charts and shaping diagrams and top-down formulas, which I cherish. Plus a small memo book or notepad in the pocket of whatever project bag I’m currently using. When I finish a thing, I try to be thorough abou translating my chicken scratch from wherever it is into a blog post, and strive to record yarn and needle sizes and sometimes yardage in a corresponding Ravelry project page. But I’m surprisingly non-thorough. Inevitably, I or one of you will have a question that neither the blog post nor the Rav page can answer, and I can’t always find which notebook or pad or printout I was scribbling in at the time. Plus I’ve been around the internet long enough that I could make a very long list of former blogs, forums and databases I’ve poured myself into that no longer exist. Poof. Only paper endures. So I’m doing what I really can’t believe I’ve never done until now: I’ve started a proper knitting journal. Which will also be able to incorporate sewing, once I get back to it!
What pushed me over the edge was finally having the beautiful Fringe Supply Co. notebooks I’ve always wanted. I’m using the larger one for my main journal and still keeping a spare for random chicken scratch and the smaller notepad in my project bag. All of the pages are perforated, so it’s nice and tidy to tear them out of elsewhere when I’m done and paste them into the journal. There are some Bullet Journal elements to how I’ve organized it: I’ve included an index in the front and a “future log” listing things that need to be made in specific months (some of which is secret, so I can’t show you that part). Entering things this way allows me to not be too control freaky about what order they get documented in the journal, since they simply get listed in the index as they’re added. And I’m striving to include everything relevant to each project: my original sketches (on Fashionary panels); the yarn label; any notes extracted from the smaller notepad; the pattern photo and chart or annotated pattern pages; needles used; and of course FO photos, just printed out and glued in. Things are variously taped, stapled or glued, or stuck in pockets I make either by taping three sides of a half-page, or gluing in an envelope. I’ve toyed with including a piece of yarn — taped in with washi tape so I can change my mind — but I think that gets to be a bit much for me personally. Haven’t decided.
It’s already getting thick since I’ve finished more things in the past three months than I normally knit in a whole year. (I loved making the gatefold for my Log Cabin Mitts log!) But as it gets fatter, I just tear out pages to make room. Again, since they’re perforated, I can remove those edges and that just becomes useful notepaper, some of which finds its way back in.
I love sitting and looking at this notebook. Love the tangibility of it, especially since four of the FOs in there have already been given away. Obviously I won’t stop blogging and Rav’ing the details like always, but I like knowing this notebook will outlast the ever-shifting tides of technology.
So that’s my Q for You today: Do you keep a knitting/sewing notebook or scrapbook of any kind? How else do you record what you make?
PREVIOUSLY in Q for You: Do you add it up?
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