Crochet Designer/ School Teacher/ Fiance’/ Graphic Designer/?

So this post was inspired by an idea Robyn had for showing a “Day in the Life of…” I rather like this idea and thought I’d jump on the bandwagon. My average day lately involves less of crochet than I’d like to admit. I’m juggling a lot of hats right now between my website, filing for trademark, being a school teacher, managing (organizing) our studio build in the basement, doing freelance graphic design, and just brainstorming/planning for other things (including a wedding…some day). This was my day this past Friday.

5:45am: Alarm is blaring. Dumb freakin’ alarm. Lar acknowledges the first beeps.
5:55am: He doesn’t generally hear any of the beeps after the first one. I crawl over him, slapping the alarm in disgust.
6:05am: “How many times can I sleep through this thing anyways?” I ask myself. I doze off again.
6:15am: “Shoot. I gottaaa get upppp??” Crawls out of bed leaving the alarm to continue blaring. I’m usually amused to find out how long it’ll continue until it’s turned off.
6:23am: Sitting on couch with breakfast watching shows from DVR. Yawning big time. Judge Judy cracks me up. It’s either that or some BRAVO show from the night before.

7:45am: Scrambles out the door late (again).

8:28am: Arrive at work a few mins. late (again).
8:39am: First class comes in. Today I have one class, a break, another class, lunch, and then four classes in a row. Ouch. And it’s Friday.
9:26am: Teacher arrives late to pick up class. I’m panicking because I have stuff to get ready for yearly observation lesson with new vice-principal (who I find creepy and don’t want in my classroom – there’s something not quite right about him and I’m not the only one who is saying it.).
9:45am: In full panic mode. Lab printer isn’t working. It’s the only way to print my lesson plan and instructional materials. Tried to print twice. Nothing. Trips back and forth from my room to the lab. Nothing.
9:55am: Finally get prints from another teacher’s printer (her room is next to mine). I’m 35 mins. behind schedule. Really panicking now. Rushing around to finish setting things up.
10:15am: 4th grade arrives and eventually creepy VP comes too (late). He proceeds to sit in my direct line of site and clankity-clank-clank-clank on his keyboard throughout my demo lesson. I try to ignore him but it’s difficult.
10:50am: VP leaves lesson 5 mins. early. I make note of it. I document everything. He misses the lesson wrap-up. I ponder if he’ll mention it in the review. He misses Student “N” who raised his hand to say, “Ms. Hirtes! The colors I’m mixing, this low-intensity blue is the color found in “Le Jockey!” (The picture we were studying). The kid got the lesson. Too bad VP didn’t stay to actually witness it.
11:05am: Head to lunch. Friday is pizza day. A bunch of kindergarteners bid me “Hello!” when I walk in. They’re funny. I feel like a movie star every time they do that.
11:15am: Run into same teacher from earlier. Tells me story of a really difficult 6th grader who I teach (she doesn’t) who made terroristic threats earlier on in her presence. She wrote him up. We contemplate what will actually get done about it – usually nothing. That’s how it is where we work. Lots of talk, very little action.
11:30am: Checks various school and personal email accounts. Answers some emails. Sends Lar a “Happy Birthday” email (hoping he’s actually awake by now). Reads ABC News online. Spends last 25 mins. of lunch preparing for four afternoon classes (1st grade, 3rd grade, kindergarten, and 5th grade. Two classes are much lower-functioning and therefore are difficult to work with. One has an aide). And crosses another day off the calendar as I did the day before. It’s mental preparation for June 23rd, our newly announced last day.

11:48am: Makes last dash to bathroom before the chaos begins.
1:26pm: Teacher (from before) and I are shocked when 6th grader gets arrested and lead away from school in cop cruiser. (I can’t reveal what was said, and wouldn’t. Just know that we weren’t shocked because of the arrest so much as the fact that the school actually did something about this student who has been a major, MAJOR problem. What he did say was witnessed by several teachers and there was no ambivalence about what was said and the validity of his comments). A sense of relief comes over me
2:19pm: 5th grade comes in. We’re doing weavings. Tammy and Robyn were both kind enough to donate yarn for their projects. Students hadn’t seen me since the yarn came in and were like children on Christmas Day seeing all the new yarn options. This group has finally settled down a bit and I can actually slow my pace down. I’m exhausted. All I’m thinking about are adult beverages now.
3:01pm: Last class finally leaves my room (late). They’re so into chatting with one another, they don’t even notice the time. Two had to be pried away from their weavings. My evil plan to get them all “into” yarn is working! One of the boys revealed he was learning to crochet after seeing my dodecaheadron on my desk. Hoot!

3:10pm: Leave school. It’s Friday!

3:40pm: Quick stop at the Oak Tree Buy Rite. Best liquor store in NJ. Picks up various 22oz beers for Lar. Double Bastard. Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale. Unearthly IPA. Stone IPA. Rogue Dead Guy. Lagunitas IPA. etc.

3:55pm: Arrives home. Traffic wasn’t bad. Checks and answers emails. Hits Ravelry. Reads Yahoo Groups. Reads ABC News and APP (local paper). Finds article about middle school principal of local school (married couple friends teach there) is arraigned in Newark, NJ for allegedly conspiring to have his car torched in Newark due to excessive lease vehicle mileage. Sends email off to friend who works there and exchanges story about my crazy day.
4:30pm: Working on stitch diagrams for a client. Having problems with one. Emails sent and received from customers/visitors to my site.

5:30pm: Do another “lap around the internets” as I call it. Rav, ABC News, various blogs, etc. Check to see if large tax return check has gone through to credit card. It has. Ponders how much longer until debt is paid off (soon). Back to Rav again, and again, and again…the Bravo Whores group always draws me in.
6:00pm: Checks emails. Opens up pattern template for client. Ponders the layout issues. Sometimes I just stare at a document until it tells me what to do. The same holds true for the crochet. Makes some adjustments.
6:15pm: Makes plan to pick up hooks tomorrow. Stares back at UFO’s on mannequins. (They’ve been there for awhile).

7:05pm: Leave for hour long drive to The Crab’s Claw Inn for Larry’s birthday dinner. On drive down, we discuss the studio build. We’re behind schedule. Really behind. I had to take it over because nothing was getting done. Ponders our three year engagement as an example of that. Deadline for completion was supposed to be June b/c of a client coming in from Louisiana. He’s a regular.

7:45pm: Call to say we’ll be late.
8:22pm: Arrive (late). Order a couple Old Speckled Hens and two orders of Buffalo Shrimp, one spicy, one “dead.”
10:00pm: Leave restaurant.

11:10pm: Arrive home. I’m asleep. Been asleep. Larry took over driving half way. Crawls under blanket on couch and out in moments. I’m known for falling asleep on a dime.

8:15am: Wake up. Turn on computer. Continue client stitch diagrams. Ponders if this’ll be another weekend day at the computer.

That’s a typical day in my life. I’m constantly juggling so many different activities. Thank heavens I don’t have kids – neither of us want any – because I wouldn’t know where to fit them into my schedule. Some days I spend time planning stuff for my site. I do a lot of that during my car ride. I’m always making lists and thinking about stuff I have to do.

Some days, as Robyn said, I just goof off. I need that time to unwind because the daily grind gets to me. I often live vicariously through others who are able to spend more time designing and crocheting, and otherwise doing things they like for a living. Some day I’ll count myself as being one of those people. Some day.

I’ve been so busy lately, and none of it involves crochet, not directly anyways. I’ve been doing tons of graphic design (illustrations, layout) for a book project coming out soon. No, not a book I’ve written but let’s just say some friends have written. We’re in the home stretch on this project and I hope it’ll be released soon. I’ll post a picture of the front cover once it’s done. I don’t want to spoil any surprises.

This process of doing the graphics and layout for the book sparked another idea (Kim’s idea really) that I ought to add this to my business plan. It was one of those ideas that took several minutes to sink in.

“Yeahhhh. That’s actually not a bad idea at all. Yeah! What a great way to pick up some cash in the summer, especially. YEAH!”

So I’m hoping that this book project will become a springboard for helping other indies get their patterns out in the public. I’m hoping to put together a portfolio of items to showcase soon. A lot will be from patterns on my site.

Maybe just maybe I won’t have to live penny to penny each and every summer. Wouldn’t that be grand?

I’m so behind in posting this, but did anyone catch the cool knits and crochet stuff going down the runway (what little there was)? Click on thumbnails for a larger view:

My favs were a vibrant green piece by Carlos Miele:

A cool black, crocheted hooded cape (maybe done in double crochet, no?) by Nicole Miller:

And this knitted sweater by Perry Ellis:

Hey lookie here. I’m on the Lime and Violet blog today. Thanks Dawn!

How I love bamboo, let my count thy ways…

Sirdar makes some of the loveliest baby bamboo yarn on the planet. No, really. Lovely stuff. I hope to use it again. It’s called, “Snuggly Baby Bamboo DK.” See:

Lovely (looking), no? It’s as soft as a baby’s behind.

Some friends of mine (and Larry) are having a baby any day now and I needed a blanket to appear tout sweet! I figured I’d never done the classic ripple (I know, shoot me. It’s like saying you’ve never boiled water, right?) so I’d give it a go. The plan was to make a blanket that would kind of go with the look of the room.

We hadn’t seen Chris (the husband who I used to work with) in awhile and we had to figure out a way to get an idea about the baby’s room without directly asking, “Hey, we’re making you a blanket. Tell us what colors you used for the room.” Coincidentally enough, he sent us a picture. What luck!

Cute, eh? Chris and I taught together in a previous life. He taught Technology, but actually has a degree in Art, as I do. I figured he’d paint something in the baby’s room.

Anyway…I couldn’t find a single baby yarn that was even close to the yellow in the room, and so I gave up on that, instead deciding to pick up the cream and green tones. Sirdar’s yarn seemed a good fit color-wise; I didn’t want it to be too matchy-matchy. The color was important but so was the yarn. I wanted it to be bamboo. It’s environmentally sustainable, non-allergenic, anti-bacterial, machine washable (although people on Rav have stated that they’d prefer to hand wash it).

I scratched out a simple pattern on paper based on a three-color scheme and set to finishing it in a few days. I’m pretty much done. I just have to secure and clip the loose ends, but here’s what I came up with:

The pic doesn’t show it, but it’s a carefully laid out repeat that looks like this (starting from the first row):

3 White
1 Green
2 Brown
1 Green
3 White

1 Brown

3 Green
1 Brown
1 White
1 Brown
3 Green

1 White

3 Brown
1 White
2 Green
1 White
3 Brown

And I just repeated that whole schpeal four times.

The lovely ladies at Lime and Violet scoured up this great stash-buster pattern from the Berroco site. It’s a dodecahedron (although Diane, who is way more mathy than I, says it’s more of a stellated dodecahedron.) Either way, it’s pretty cool, so I set out to make one.

Despite my crochet prowess, the instructions sucked and I was on my own. In the end, I figured it out (sort of). The last cone (the one in the middle towards the top of the pic) wound up being bigger than the others. Oh well. The average person wouldn’t know unless I pointed it out.

If you look, you’ll see that I used the remains of a lot of different types of yarns I had lying around the house including a bunch of novelty yarns I had no intentions of ever using again. There’s also some crochet cotton, chenille, and wool yarns of varying weights.

If you’re using finer weight yarns, just complete an extra row of single crochets (or double up the yarn) to compensate for the lack of thickness. It’s not like you have to worry about gauge with this one.

My friend Stephanie has requested one for her son, Miller, so I’ll try to post how I made it work. I decided to make mine as not only a stash buster, but as a “talk ball” for my students (the only one who can talk is the one who has the ball!)

This is a petition to get another season of Knitty Gritty at a reasonable hour. Please support our sister craft and sign the petition (and if you have a ba-gillion other fake email addys as I do, use those and sign more than once please).

When Larry and I met, he introduced me to some cool music including the ever funky Brooklyn Funk Essentials. They’re freakin AWESOME. Check out their other CD’s on iTunes and a few tracks on their MySpace page as well as some videos of theirs. Some tracks like “I Got Cash” aren’t for the faint of heart Sarcasm abounds. As soon as Larry was into them, they left the country and only toured in Europe. Soon after, they stopped playing…until now. They’re back from an 8 year hiatus.

The crochet connection? Check out the cover of their next CD, “Watcha Playin:”

(image from website – no name to give CD artwork credit to)

...And what’s everyone’s is free for the taking (sharing/swapping), no matter who it hurts.

The icing on the cake is when a thief has no remorse for what he or she has done. When they present an argument that’s akin to callousness (“We don’t have these patterns available in our language, so we translated them without asking. You didn’t lose any money. So what?”), I just want to throw up my hands in disgust (or come up with a clever ruse like this).

Don’t tell me that there’s some sort of cultural divide that prohibits others from understanding the difference between the terms “share” and “steal.” That’s a poor excuse, not a valid reason. If I walked into your home and took your pattern books, I’d be stealing them. What’s the difference between that and taking my online content and passing it off as your own or giving it to someone else? The other poor excuse I heard yesterday was that because patterns are virtual goods, they therefore cannot be stolen because they aren’t tangible goods. “Goods” are the fruits of ones labor and when taken are considered stolen. Plain and simple.

And when someone takes content that I’ve created and posts it elsewhere, I’ve lost valuable exposure in the form of website traffic, which translates into money. Posting a free pattern on my site draws people there and in turn, creates business and exposure for the sellable patterns I produce. The same holds true for the videos I create. Taking the content and not being given proper credit doesn’t help me gain exposure, as some might think. It just ticks me off.

Going back to the crafty website that took my content, I would have been fine with the inclusion of my image had they actually asked. Additionally, I would have been more comfortable with slapping my logo on the image so it was clear where it was derived from. But like I said, I wasn’t given notice of intent to display the image on their site.

Copy Lefts vs Copy RIGHTS

The pervasive attitude amongst the “Copy Lefts” (as opposed to those of us who believe in copy RIGHTS) is that it’s getting harder to create original works of art, and therefore, “borrowing” the work of others to help make new works is one way to bridge the creativity gap. The other tenant is that they feel if they were indeed to ask permission, obtaining a license to redistribute the original work in a new form would be too costly. This about sums up the “Good Copy Bad Copy” philosophy (And not for nothing, but holding up Nigeria as a fertile land of creativity because they make twice as many movies has got to be a mindless joke on the part of the writer(s) of this “documentary.”) Some people feel we’re a “Culture of Ownership” and that’s what’s prohibiting us as a society from moving forward creatively. I say we’re a Culture of Thieves.

Young people (and many who are engrossed in the online world) today have this attitude as though everything should be for free and in their immediate grasp (I teach Monday through Friday and see about 900 kids in a school year, so I consider myself an expert on child psychology in the practical sense of the word). This directly relates back to my biz in that I can’t tell you how many times I get emails from people asking for more free content than I already give out. (I’ll save that rant for another day. I could write a book about it). It crosses the line when these people take content that was not deemed to be “free” and make it free without asking. It’s an aggressive approach to forcing their “copy left” ideals, to say the least.

I have no hard and fast answers for the problem (yes, it is a problem). There is no easy solution that is beneficial for both sides of the coin. Don’t expect it to happen. Just note that this country was based on the concept of ownership in many, MANY respects and I’d be hard-pressed to learn of us going against our founding principles.

Allow me to end with a quote. I loved this quip from Girl From Auntie on Ravelry: “Information doesn’t want to be free. You want information to be free.” That makes me chuckle every time.

Have you ever worked on a project that took over your LIFE? I spent forever and a day working on a top for Interweave that I was elated to get out the door and out of my sight. Primordial groans could be heard from house at all hours of the day and night while slaving over that beast.

At the heart of the issue was the yarn: 2-ply and quite tangly. Ripping back was like a frontal lobotomy performed with spoons. I might have gotten several stitches out free and clear but then one would tug and need to be pulled individually. UGH. Ugh! Not to mention that I ripped back several times. Oh, the agony of defeat.

This isn’t to say that my methods of designing lend themselves to easier, less painful crocheting. I tend to work by testing ideas out, but this often leads to lots of ripping out. It’s just the way I work. I admire those who can go into a design and know exactly what they intend to do and get it right the first time (how do you all do that?).

But this time around, it had to be 2-ply yarn and it just took forever to complete. And did I mention that I got sick?

Yeah, two weeks ago I had an awful time of it. I spent a Tuesday working through a fever. It was an easy day so I stuck with it but collapsed when I got home at 4 pm (and stayed sleeping for the next 15 hours or so). I called out Wed., Thurs., and Fri. All this and I was expecting to send the top out that Wednesday. YEAHhh RIGHT!.

I just finished it and sent it out today. The kicker? I forgot to measure the final piece and take a gauge measurement (so it’s not like I can guestimate based on the gauge). Yep. Now I’m screwed.