Two Things I Really Like

1. Ravelry

I've probably mentioned Ravelry a few times already. It's website for cataloguing knitting and crochet projects, patterns and yarns, so it's highly relevant, to say the least! The reason why I remembered that I love it is ...

I started making this scarf last week:

I found the yarn in the drawer of the coffee table and started making it on impulse. It's just a very simple V-stitch, I could practically do it in my sleep once I got the hang of it. I was working away happily on it here and there for a week, when I suddenly noticed with a sinking feeling that the ball was looking a little anaemic. Will I have enough yarn to make a scarf that's not pathetically short? Did I have 2 balls of this yarn, or just the one?

Am I feeling lucky, punk??

So I looked up my stash of almost 250 yarns in my Ravelry database. The ballband had gone astray, and I couldn't remember what it was called. All I did was change the display settings to 'Alphabetical by Colourway', scroll down to 'lavender' and there it was! I do have two balls, and not only that, I know exactly where the other one is! Easy!
My careful record-keeping back when I bought the yarn (entering in the colour, location, a photo of it, etc.) has proved invaluable, but if it weren't for Ravelry, I could never have kept those records in the first place. Yay!

2. Protopage

I was put onto Protopage a couple of years ago by friend/mentor A., after I complained about my bad luck with finding a site/tool to read blogs with, that doesn't disappear after 6 months. Protopage is basically an extremely simple webpage creator. You add boxes to it which can contain blog subscriptions, links, lists, images or just text. You can make them open to the public, private, or password-protected if you only want to share your page with certain people. Mine is private, but I'll show you a screenshot:

I created tabs which can hold blogs on different topics: craft, art, fashion, culture, news, etc. My interests tend to oscillate between different things. I'll be totally obsessed with crochet for a month or two. Then I get bored with that and I want to read all about embroidery, or altering clothes, then back to crochet. I set up the tabs and boxes within them so it would make it easy for me to find blogs about things that interest me at that moment. And it's great!

Over time, however, I slowly noticed that I was slipping behind on some of my favourite blogs. While I was skipping straight to the Fashion tab to get inspiration from Le Blog de Big Beauty and By Anika, I somehow got 3 months behind on Crazy Aunt Purl and Little Lixie! I was strangely upset when I realised. It's like a friend that you love spending time with, and you suddenly realised you haven't called her in ages.

So I took the easy and obvious solution, and I created a new tab for my favourite blogs of all genres. Once I've read all the new posts from that, I then go to my current tabs of interest. I feel much happier now. Yay!

P.S. I started Yet Another new project last night. I'll post some pics soon!