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Tinking Turtle Raverly

A Brief Visual Tour of TNNA 2015, in Columbus, OH

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I’m at TNNA this weekend (I’m leaving tomorrow afternoon), and having a ball.  It’s a lot of networking (which can sometimes be a little hard), but it’s also just so wonderful to spend time with people who are passionate about the same things.

However, after using my words all day. I’m fairly worded out.  So today’s a brief visual tour to TNNA, with captions.

 

Bags full of knitted and crochet goodies, for the fashion show!

Getting Ready to the TNNA Fashion Show, backstage.

Painted Canvas Trolley with Ashland, VA on the side

Ashland, VA represented! I was shocked.

 

Knitted and Crochet Teepee with Addi's booth.

Knitted and Crochet Teepee in Addi’s booth.

My mittens at the Willow Designer Breakfast at TNNA.

My mittens at the Willow Designer Breakfast at TNNA.

Making net out of Sprang.

Learning how to work Sprang with Carol James – she’s a really great teacher!

 

There were so many other things I want to share with you, and I will, once I get home.  I have yarns I’m excited about, patterns and opportunities.  But for now, I really should get ready for tomorrow… and figure out how I’m going to get all my yarn home.

Catching Up – and a little bit of Gardening

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After threatening rain all day, it’s finally started.  This Monday’s been a slow one, as I’m getting my momentum moving after a week of being a little slow and lazy.

I’ve spoken before about how I’ve been going, going, going since January, and this last week I finally took a break.  Oh, I didn’t stop working, but I went nearly a week with only doing a minimum of crocheting or knitting.  It was necessary on a few different levels; creatively and physically I needed a break.

So I’ve been trying to tidy up the mess that has become our home, as I’m slowly sucking in the clutter that has taken over… well, any space that Mr. Turtle would let me.  It’s not done by a long shot, but I’ve been given a deadline: put it away before TNNA, or it won’t be there when I come back.  *grins* I think it’s more than fair.

I’ve also been working with Cultivar Designs on the new website.  Two weeks ago I was feeling very grim about the project: it felt like I’d been having meeting after meeting with the Cultivar team, and nothing was showing for the work.  Now, that has nothing to do with Cultivar, and everything to do with my mood two weeks ago. Now, this last week I got to the the beginnings of the developed site (dev site), and I can finally see where this whole project is going.

I’ve also been working on the garden this spring.

Columbine Seedlings, along with some other fun plants.

(You remember the garden?  The woefully neglected one?  And then my knitting friends gave me plants, and I moved things around, and it was a little better, but then then weeds took over?)

Well, a lot has happened since then.  I may have lost my head at one time and bought 150 bulbs from Costco.  And then I started about 50 Columbine plants from seed… because I could, and I was worried that they wouldn’t grow.

In order to facilitate getting the plants in the ground, Mr. Turtle and I had a “garden party” which involved getting our friends over, bullying them into helping get vegetable plants in the ground and the garden mulched, feeding everyone cookout food, and then sending them home with their own seedlings to plant.  It worked out rather well, and the veggie garden is coming along a lot nicer than last year, already.

The peas in particular are pretty happy.

I’m trying out sheet mulching – a method for reducing weeds in garden beds that have been long neglected (which could easily describe the gardens at the house we’re renting).  I’ve been putting down cardboard and then putting down wood mulch on top.  Since we’re on a budget, the wood mulch is coming from the local dump.  The locals I’ve talked to have different opinions on the much.  Some say that it’s pretty “dirty and seedy” – in that the much is made of a lot of different types of wood, and sometimes contains plastic and other bits.  Others said that if you dig into the pile (where the much heats up), you can get much that’s less contaminated.  We’re going to give it a try, seeing as I don’t think it can be very much worse than what I’ve got already.

This would be the flower bed last year (you can orient by that purple flower in the middle)
And this would be the same bed, with the same purple flower, this year, looking more happy.

Unfortunately, even with all the cardboard I saved up over the winter, I’m running out.  But… again, knitters come to the rescue – a call out to my knitting friends, and I’ve been picking up and finding cardboard on my front porch all weekend.  Two more trips, I think, and things will be good.

What have you been working on, outside of stitching?

Follow-ups and a few other details, including a new LYS I’ll be teaching at!

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Wow, I’ve gotten a lot of responses to my previous post  – I appreciate the support, emails, and congrats!

I wanted to talk a little bit more about the process of filming with Interweave, since I’ve gotten a fair amount of questions about it.

One of the biggest questions I got was: how did you manage to film four classes in two days?

First, Interweave’s got a great team that make the filming process smooth and intuitive.  They were a huge help in making sure everything went smoothly.  Having worked backstage more than once, I have a little bit of an idea of what goes on to prepare for a shoot.  The second biggest thing that makes a difference when filming the classes is the preparation I did before we even began filming.

When I began packing for CO, all of my clothes went into my checked luggage.  The luggage I carried with me, and refused to surrender?  Was filled with something called “step-outs.”

What are step-outs, you might ask?  Think of nearly any cooking show you’ve ever seen.  That moment, when the host puts an uncooked cake in the oven, and the next moment pulls out the finished product?  I bet you wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the entire filming crew isn’t waiting around for the cake to bake.  The host, team, or someone has baked a cake beforehand, to enable the host to go onto the next step.

When preparing for the filming, I did something similar.

The last two weeks have been a flurry of working the same project over and over, each time working one “step” further.  When we’re filming, I simply grab the project that’s on the next step, allowing me to skip ahead.  Each of these unfinished projects is called a step-out, and they’re an important part of making a film class run smoothly.

Different people manage their step outs different ways.  Each of mine went into a separate plastic bag, labeled with it’s order, and with a few different “hints” to remind me why I created the step out, and what it was supposed to be used for.  They then all went on a tray, where I could grab them in between takes.

These were the ones for the barber pole cowl, along with my notes.
Using step-outs for class isn’t anything new: I often create similar things for my workshops.  Still, having to have all the step outs for for classes has consumed most of my time for the last two weeks.  And I have to admit it wasn’t even very absorbing work: basically, I did the same project over and over, each time going onto the next step.
Even if I love a design, the process became boring.
Still, it meant on filming day, I could grab and go, use the step-out, and move onto the next step.  It also means that now that I’m back, I’m having to sort through everything that I tossed into my luggage at the end of the day.
Which kind of is a metaphor for how I’ve been conducting my life for the last two months.
I’m taking some time now to step back.  In a month I leave for TNNA, and there’s some larger-picture goals I have for the show this year.  Meanwhile, I have two guest bedrooms, and office, and other spaces around the house that have become a disaster.  I’ve went two steps beyond “I can’t find anything,” and have launched myself into “I must leap over the piles to get to anything.”
As Mr. Turtle has reminded me, the floor should not be used for a shelf.
So the next two weeks are going to be devoted unpacking, organizing and getting back into the normal Tinking Turtle grove.  If you haven’t heard from me, chances are your email is lurking in the bottom of my inbox – please be patient.

In other news, I’m adding a LYS to my teaching roster: Untangled Purls, in Fredericksburg, VA.  I’ve added the class offerings to my calendar – take a look.

Finally, I’ve been working the last few months with the Cultivar Design team to create a new Tinking Turtle website.  It was time, and I’ve been saving up for this endeavor for a while.  In the next couple of weeks you’ll be hearing and seeing some changes – and hopefully the result being a website where you can find out what you need a little bit faster.

One of the things I’m looking forward to is an updated calendar, which I’m absolutely excited and thrilled to have… since the google calendar I use now does the job, but not elegantly, and it’s really hard to add pictures.  You should, with the new calendar, be able to be able to see where classes are located a little bit better.

Industry Metrics: What You Need To Know

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One of the reasons I love working with Michael is the new perspective he brings to the business.  He might not be able to knit a hat, but he can tell me that this winter, I should be doing different things to improve my sales.  Today he touches on one of the tools you can use to make business decisions – data analysis.

We are all surrounded by data.  In our daily lives, from the morning commute to the afternoon water-cooler conversations, there exists a wealth of data in the world around us. Data is one part in a hierarchy of ways to think about and interpret the world around us.  Unto itself, individual data points have no meaning. It is only with analysis that information, which is data that is used to make decisions, can be derived.  This decision-making lends us knowledge, which is the goal of informed decision-making.  By being able to interpret and synthesize the data available in any industry, business owners can take advantage of opportunities.

pattern, knit, designing, math, data, analytic, spreadsheet, metrics, tinking turtle
Knitting Designing is all about turning Data like measurements and stitch counts into information: the finished pattern
My day job is as an IT manager for a healthcare technology company in DC; in this role I deal constantly with large data sets, turning various discreet data points into usable knowledge.  This type of analytic approach is vitally important for small businesses (and the craft industry) in order to understand the market and position yourself to take advantage of trends.  For fiberarts businesses (both LYS’s and designers/publishers), this is doubly important; with any commodity based industry, trends can come and go at a breakneck pace.  What was trendy last fall may have fallen by the wayside this year; it is only by being able to analyze the market that you can position yourself to act accordingly.
In the Fiberarts industry, there is a wealth of discreet data that is ripe for the picking.

Bristol, (BristolIvy on Ravelry) writes a regular series entitled The Stock(inette) Market where she takes an in-depth look at pattern sales trends based on Ravelry data for a period of time.  She aggregates this data, and then provides the analysis to be able to discern trends and areas of growth. This provides savvy designers a starting point for getting an idea of where the market is headed.  For example, in her most recent post covering the month of September, she finds that as we head towards the cooler months, neck accessories are the dominant sales driver, along with cold weather accessories such as hats, mittens, and gloves.  Gathering this information over a period of time, up to and including years, the savvy statistician can paint a picture of the market, and be able to position themselves to take advantage of publishing patterns at the opportune time.


For TNNA members, the organization offers a wonderful resource in the form of a series of surveys they conduct of all fiber artists on a regular basis.  This data consists of a wide range of information, from yarns frequented to number of projects on needles at one time.  In addition to being able to demonstrate current trends, the TNNA data is presented in comparison to previous surveys, to show trends over time, a powerful way to look at data to gain insight into the future.

Ravelry itself can be a source of data, such as in the graph below, mined from our Tinking Turtle sales.
chart, excel, pie, tinking turtle, patterns, designs, type, socks, softie, pullover, hat

One must be wary, however, in relying completely on technology to package and interpret data for us.  Technology can be useful to turn data into information, however it is that human interpretation that gives analysis it’s kick.  If computers could provide the right analysis every time, there’d be no need for weather forecasters, for instance.  How you turn data into knowledge is what differentiates man from machine.  This is an important distinction for business owners for all fiberarts related businesses.  Creating knowledge is one of the cornerstones for how one can grow a successful business in this or any industry.

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