Shambling Towards Perfection

Last night I started dismantling my Wall o' Stickies representing my product backlog and finished items,  and before I did so I figured I'd take some photos to commemorate all the hard work documented on my walls. Here's the final state of the backlog and finished item areas: As you can see I started to run out of room in the finished section there at the end. And here the finished items are, nicely stacked into piles for each sprint: The backlog contains a lot of items that were OBE (overcome by events) by being rewritten and implemented in a slightly different way, plus some ponies and things that turned out to be too big or not necessary after all. I'll have to go back through these later this summer and get rid of the OBE items and rewrite the rest. Some of them I would still like to implement, so I'll probably do a sprint or two and knock out a few items. Plus there were a few bugs that turned up at the end, so I do need to fix those. So there are...

I figure I may as well start sprinting, as it were, since I've been slowly doing stuff anyway, and this will help me be more organized about it. From my initial backlog I finished two items: Post on Ravelry asking about discrepancies with swatches/question numbers Finish reformatting instructions It turns out that I discovered a slight error in the instructions (for 3 swatches the wrong questions were listed) during my reformatting of the instructions. So now I can proceed knowing that I have the correct questions figured out for each swatch. Anyhow those two items are no longer in the product backlog, so I'll proceed with the next-highest priority items. The sprint goal is to finish gathering materials and finish prepping so that I'm ready to start knitting swatches. I think, since this is supposed to be fun and not work, that I shall not have an actual sprint length. It'll just be done when the items are done. The sprint backlog items are: Priority Descripti...

So I figured I'd begin with listing all the items I've got figured out so far. This will be the product backlog. Some of these items will definitely need breaking down, such as the individual swatches, and probably even the project ('cause it'll take a bit), but this is just the first go at the backlog anyway. I'm listing priorities and rough estimations of time, too. Priority Description Points 1000 Post on Ravelry asking about discrepancies with swatches/question numbers .5 950 Finish reformatting instructions 1 900 Wind all yarn for project, swatches, and test swatches .5 850 Find all books 3 800 Catalog books in Ravelry and also in a file in the format for the paper 2 750 Test knit "slingshot" long tail cast-on 1 700 Test bind off techniques to eliminate having a big stitch below last bound off stitch 1 650 Test knit a stockinette swatch to find gauge 1 600 Block test swatch .5 550 Measure test swatch .5 500 Type up cover letter .5 450 P...

So now that my Master of Science degree is complete, I've decided to start working on the The Knitting Guild Assocation 's (TKGA)  Masters Program - Hand Knitting . There are 3 levels, and the first involves knitting a mitten plus 16 swatches, writing a report and answering questions about the swatches. On the surface it seems pretty easy, but from reading the Ravelry group's posts  I'm quite convinced that it's not. The knitting has to be technically nearly perfect: no weird stretched out stitches, no "rowing out" (in stockinette, where your purls and knits aren't the same tension so there's a visible difference between rows), etc. The swatches and mitten are to be blocked, which helps with some things, but not everything. It's extremely common to have to re-knit and/or re-write things, even by very experienced knitters (e.g. people who've been knitting 30 or 40 years). It should be plenty challenging for me. I'm currently working on...