All on account of the snow…

And in the end, the Morris County courthouse is closed tomorrow because of the blizzard.  Imagine that.  So I don’t have to report for jury duty.  Life has a way of working itself out.  Meanwhile the emails are pouring in with all kinds of new and unusual opportunities that should take up most of my lovely free month of February, because, well life has a sense of humor.  I put one magazine article to bed early in case I was put on a case, and since there is no jury duty tomorrow, I received an opportunity today to write a couple more.  Stay tuned there…

All on account of the airlines…

I’m really not jumping topics here, but I want to give a bit of a back story.  If you have ever taken a class with me, you know I travel with a couple of huge overstuffed binders that have my portfolio, every magazine article I’ve ever written or been featured in, (and there are more than 50 at this point) and a bulging one with my design journal from about 2000 to about 2013.  I ran out of room and had to start a second one.

Weight is a huge issue.  If you’ve ever picked me up at the airport when I’m on the road, you know I travel with two carefully packed 50 pound suitcases, to the ounce, and a wheeled carry on, designed to fit with not an 1/8″ of room to spare, in the overhead bin, and a computer bag that barely fits under the seat depending on what knitting project is stuffed in there with the computer equipment.  So that 20 plus pounds of overstuffed binders is problematic.  But I usually have to refer to them during the course of a teaching engagement, so I don’t want to not have them.

All on account of the US Post Office…

Last September, because I was teaching for seven days at Sievers, and doing a half day demo on a different topic, and giving a keynote address, I decided that I’d try to squeeze out a little extra space in my luggage by shipping one of the heaviest of the binders by reliable Priority Mail in a medium flat rate box.  It takes two days to get to the ferry dock at Sievers in Wisconsin, and I sent it off a couple of days ahead, so it would be there when I arrived.  I arrived on a Thursday, and by Saturday, my critical and beloved overstuffed portfolio with tear sheets from every article I’ve ever written, not easily recreated, was traced to Texas, where it seemed to vanish.  Then came the fire at the air traffic controllers tower at O’Hare.  Which halted all sorts of flights around the country.

I went into a bit of a panic mode.  The binder was somewhere, and I tried to think positively that the US Post Office wouldn’t lose it (but Texas?) and that it would eventually surface, but I swore I’d come up with an alternative for the future instead of ever letting these precious binders out of my sight.

The box finally arrived Monday afternoon, just shy of a week in transit, and I carried on much relieved.

All on account of Verizon Wireless…

Really, this is all related…  Last November, Black Friday to be exact, my husband noticed that there were deals to be had at the Verizon Wireless store, and that it would be a good day to upgrade our phones.  I won’t mention the insanity of upgrading phones on Black Friday and the stress I put myself under when I have to learn new technology, and reload and update something like a new smart phone, but I did, and it is done, but the perk here was that by upgrading a couple of phones, we were entitled to a couple of free tablets.  I don’t own a tablet.  Of any kind, unless you count my Kindle HD, which I only use for reading books.  The deal was, we’d have to pay for monthly data on the two tablets,  but $10 a month each is easily absorbed by my business and it made sense.

Between Thanksgiving break and Christmas break for my daughter, she began the tedious task of scanning and organizing all of my magazine articles into jpeg’s which could easily be loaded into the tablets and viewed whenever I needed to access them.  I was able to easily recreate my portfolio digitally, actually doubling the quantity of works I had archived since images of them already existed in my computer in various files.  That left the design journal, which was a bit of a head scratch.  I could have just scanned in the sheets, but there were a lot of yarn samples, and overlapping items, and text and drafts that just wouldn’t have been as clear and I really had to update many of the pages since some of the yardage had been made into garments, and there was a lot of missing information.  I keep good records.  Not great records…

And so we come back to the beginning and the point of this blog post.  Life has a way of directing you to where it wants you to go, and because I finished up my article early, I started in on recreating a bulging design journal into a digital one, searching out drafts, photographs, and technical information that showed me that I really am a bit of a sloppy record keeper.  But the records are there…

I’m up to 37  pages, most of the entries take up two pages.  I’m only about half finished and one entry takes about an hour to do.  It is a challenging but satisfying task, and now I have a spitting chance of finishing it before I start traveling the end of February.  This is what an entry looked like in the binder…

And this is what it looks like now with the added images of the finished garment and all the dye formulas which were kept in yet another bulging binder…

So now, when I’m on the road, instead of this…

I’ll be able to use these…

…to present my entire portfolio, including minor works, knitting and sewing projects, my entire design portfolio, every article I’ve ever written, and probably my sewing archives from the ten binders we scanned in last summer.  And yes, all of this is stored in numerous locations in the cloud as well, so I can access it all as long as I have a data connection.

So thanks to the snow, and some hiccups along the way, and some sort of OK record keeping, I’m able to convert much of my archives into a format that will neatly fit in my purse…

Stay tuned…