Now that I've Mastered Science, I want to be a Master... of KNITTING!

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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 getting organized and figuring out how to attack this. The instructions are kind of weirdly organized for my tastes, so I'm cutting them up and pasting them back together in a format that makes more sense to me. All the info about the swatches (including the questions relating to them) will be in one place, then all the info about the report, etc. In their original form the info was more spread about, making it harder for me to grok what needed to be done for each section.

I'm also still gathering my books together (hopefully including the ones that have been lingering in the garage since we moved 4 years ago... Oops.) and figuring out which have the info I need for the report. It's on "blocking and care of hand knits", and while the blocking part is thoroughly covered in several of my books, care is somewhat neglected (I'm interpreting "care" as including storage, as that is just as important as how items are washed and otherwise handled). I find this rather distressing, considering how clothing can be ruined if it's not cared for or stored properly. So considering the dearth of information in my books, on this topic I have consulted with one of my extremely awesome friends who is an art conservator. She knows all about how different materials should be handled and stored so as to keep them from degrading, and she has kindly agreed to recommend some more authoritative sources for this information (like, actually scientific, so in addition to there being more info it's more likely to be correct than what's in knitting books, anyway).

I've decided on using scrumish methods to organize everything and plan when I'll be doing what. Probably I won't do strict time-boxing, because this is supposed to be fun, but the product backlog, sprint backlog, etc. will be useful. Way back when I was doing research on being a one-person scrum team at the beginning of my Masters project, I found a lot of info on people using scrum to organize their daily lives, so it's not a new idea (frequently this was called "personal scrum" (and again here and here, among others) as opposed to "one person scrum" or "solo scrum", which was more often used for a one-person scrum team for software development, I found). Anyway it seems like it will work.

Ideally I would like to get the first level finished before the end of summer, so in the fall if the intro psych class I'm taking is unexpectedly a lot of work (I consider this extremely unlikely), I won't have to abandon it. On the other hand if the intro psych class isn't much work, as I strongly suspect it will be, I can start working a bit on Level II in the fall, if I finish Level I by the end of summer. So either way I want to get moving!

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