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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.