Last FO of the Month

In several ways actually. Today I handed in my Ravelry term paper after working on it most of the night (that's my MO for papers, because if I did have a middle name, it would be 'procrastination'!), so I should get my grade back in about 4-6 weeks. The professors are just as swaped as the students at the end of the semester, so it's gonna be a while.

I also finished the Boteh Scarf a few days ago, but didn't have time to post about it yet.


Yet another try at capturing the length and pattern of a scarf. One day I'll find a better way to do it. :)




(click for bigger pictures)
The pattern instructs you to add a border of hdc around the scarf after you're done with the pattern repeats. I almost didn't do this, because it sounded like an enourmous amount of work, but then I read on Ravelry that one person who crocheted it, thought it was definitely worth it. And I have to agree. The left picture is before the edge, the right after. It looks much tidier and the edge-dtrcs are more stable.

Since I had two skeins of Lorna's Laces Black Purl, I did 24 instead of 16 repeats and then steamed it lightly after finishing. Very pretty.

The only thing I'm not that happy about it the way the two skeins differed even though they were from the same dye lot.

I changed the skein in the middle of this triangle and since I had only wound up the first skein, I didn't notice until I actually wound up the second that it's much more brown than black/grey. It's very drastic at that one point, but since the border is in the brown one, that kind of brings the difference together again. I'm just happy I didn't knit socks with this, because those would have looked awful next to each other, whereas the scarf will be mostly wound around my neck, so it should be less noticable.

Finally, last part of today. I plan to start keeping track of the yards in my stash here on the blog. I already have an Ecxel file over the last few months on my computer, but I fell like I need a bar here as well to keep me going. :)

My goal is to use up at least as much yarn as I buy each month, if possible, actually reduce my stash. At the moment I have 39,154 yards, and I want to get down to 20,000 yards. Since I'm a bit anal about my Ravelry stash, I actually know pretty accurately how much yarn I use each month and how much I buy. Since February I'm already down by about 4000 yards, but I knit/crochet about 1,500 yards a month (1,486 this month, which is pretty good, considering how insane it was) so it's going to take me a while (13 months if I don't buy any new yarn, which, let's be realistic, is not happening).

In fact this month, I only barely got a positive using/buying ratio (148 yards more used than bought) and I'm already expecting some more yarn next month. Although so far it's only 2 mini skeins of Opal (~47 yards each) and one skein of STR Lightweight (360 yards). I'm so excited about the second. I've been meaning to buy STR for forever, but always found too many and then couldn't decide. Now the Doctors Without Borders colourway caught my eyes right away and I just had to have it. And 6$ something in shipping isn't too bad. :)

PS: Reading over this last part again, can you notice that I've been writing statistics for the last 2 days? ;)

Yet Another Onset of Startitis...

It seems I get Startitis every couple of months, but this time I really did it. I not only started three new knitting projects,

Morning Surf Scarf	Coupling	Shetland Shimmer

but also two crochet projects.

Washcloth	Bathmat

On a much more productive note, I finally finished the centre square of the Log Cabin blanket!


Well, almost finished...

Like almost anybody else I just hate weaving in ends, but am trying to be a good little knitter and do it as soon as I finish a sqaure, instead of waiting till the end.

In term paper news, I sent out most of the yarn and stitch markers, so they should arrive in while (remember they go overseas). :) 4 people still haven't answered my mails, so I'm going to try again this weekend and if they still haven't answered by next Sunday, I'll do a re-draw and let the new people know about their luck. :D

And the Winners Are...

Not quite as exciting as the Oscars, but the drawing for the Tausendschön yarn took place this morning. :) The four lucky winners have been contacted and tomorrow I'll go on a little expedition to the Tausendschön shop. (I've never been to the actual shop before, only their website, so this is exciting!)

So, here we have the winners of one skein each of Tausendschön sock yarn:
Julie
Kerry
Julia and
Jan

Congratulations!

In the end 1,482 people finished the survey and 1,371 of those entered into the drawing, so I felt incredibly bad that I only had 4 prizes to give out. On the other hand, I really can't afford giving away more yarn, so instead I drew another 10 names and those people will be getting stitch markers! :) A few of those markers are here already, others are still making their way over from the US, so a photo of those I ordered from a German store:

There are only 3 or 4 in a set, but for a lot of patterns you don't need more and they are really pretty! The snag-free wire also helps in making the knitting as comfortable as possible and they have a pleasant weight, not too heavy, not too light.

Again, the winners have been contacted and here they are:
Liz
Penny
Betsy
Cindy
Joy
Lindsey
Kate
Regenia
Rachel and
Kirsten

Congratulations to those ten as well!

And again, thank you to everybody who participated. I'll talk with my professor about offering the results as a download, for those interested, but can't guarantee that yet. If it's okay, I'll probably have that ready in late July or early August, depending on how long the grading takes. I'll let you know here on the blog.

Figures.

Of course, the day after I write about haing SoSS, the new pattern for the last round of Sock Madness is released and I want to start knitting it right away.

I haven't started yet, however, because I'm still trying to finish the centre piece of the Log Cabin Blanket (I don't think I will succeed. That'd mean knitting over 15,000 stitches today in addition to a load of other work I have to do.) for my monthly goals. But at least I did some more work on it when I hadn't touched it since Easter.

But even though I haven't started the socks yet, I have selected the yarn for them.


(Click on the photo to see which yarns I chose)

The leg of the pattern is made from three stripes of triangles, so I chose three colour families and then 4 different yarns in each colour family to make the triangles from. I'm so excited to start these soon. :)

Also, today is the last day to fill out my Ravelry survey! Almost 1500 of you have filled it out already and I can't say how grateful I am for that. My professor was quite astonished when I met with him last week and told him the number. :)

Sock Teasers and Thank Yous

I promised sock pictures for today, didn't I?

Oops. Well, two pictures now, story behind the socks on another day.


Just that much: they're both Colinette Jitterbug colourways. :)

And now the reason I'm actually posting today even though I should be in bed:

Thank you.

Seriously. I had not expected to already have that many answers to the survey only 24 hours after I opened it. I'm extremely grateful that so many of you are taking the time to answer the questions, have encouraged me and also told me that you think it'll be interesting to see the results. It's very, very much appreciated.

Another reason is that Jorun posted an interesting comment and since I think that some of you might be wondering the same thing, I thought I'd share my answer to her here as well.

I just completed the survey but I must admit it left me feeling a bit confused. Everything seemed to focus on collaborative pattern-making. I'm not a very active member, but pattern-making has never come up in nay of the forums I follow or in discussions with Ravelry friends.

For me, Ravelry is about community, to see what others have done from a certain yarn or pattern, quick access to blogs and the possibility to keep track of ideas. I felt that these concepts were not present in your survey.

I agree with your last part. I'm not that active myself and for me the allure of Ravelry right from the beginning were the various database functions. I've come to like and enjoy the groups as well, but I'm still not terribly active in them.

The whole database thing is underrepresented in the survey simply because it's not the focus of my seminar. The first draft of the survey actually included many more questions about all the functions of Ravelry (because I was interested in that as well), but the seminar is about innovation management in online communities, i.e. the collaboration of people to develop something new online. So I had to focus on that aspect of Ravelry.

I'm sure some of the questions may seem a bit weird, for one thing because of the point mentioned above, but for another because there are several other people doing basically the same survey in other communities and we have to be able to compare the results, so some of the intricacies of Ravelry got lost.

Nevertheless, although the focus is on collaborative designing, everybody's answers and opinions are important to get a representative result, not just those of the people who are very active in the designing of patterns. I'm sure without people (who don't design) using and liking their patterns, many designers wouldn't even design and they and their patterns certainly wouldn't be as well known.

The Survey Is Here!!!

I finally got the survey for my term paper online today, so if anybody would like to help me find out what Ravelry's success is all about, please take 20 minutes and fill it out. Any member can fill it out even though some of the questions are more geared towards designers or people heavily involved in the community. It's just as important to get answers from the less active members. Every voice counts, you know! ;)

The Survey

Among everybody who answers the survey I'll also be giving away 4 skeins of Tausendschön sock yarn! The colours will be chosen when I know who won, so I can take your tastes into account, but they're all pretty!

The survey is online until midnight May 31 and the winners will be announced here the day after and contacted however they choose.

In case you haven't noticed yet, I'm really excited about this. :)

I also have some sock knitting picture to share, but that'll have to wait till tomorrow. I've typed so much today that I only want to knit instead of write about knitting.

Brainy Things

Brainless


A screenshot of my Ravelry queue yesterday. I queued exactly the same project within two days, with exactly the same idea for yarn and couldn't remember ever seeing the pattern before.

Brainy

Today it's finally official: my prof approved my topic for my term paper in a seminar on 'Modern Innovation Marketing'. Now, why is this interesting for my knitting blog, you ask? Well... the online community I'm researching is Ravelry! :D

I don't think I've ever been so excited about a term paper before. The topic of my paper is the mode of operation in virtual communities of innovation, i.e. why do people participate in online communites, publish their ideas there (instead of trying to make a profit from it), how does the whole process work and what performance indicators are there.

I'll be posting an online survey in a couple of weeks and would be eternally grateful if as many Ravelers as possible answer it. There are prizes to be won! *dangles the carrot yarn* :D