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11 Things you Should Know about Camera and Picture Storage

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Picture storage, cannon, camera, DSLR, Rebel, TI3, 50 mm lens, craft, photography, knitting, crochetIt’s a function of this day and age that more and more people take photos or pictures.  With a
camera being able to fit in your pocket, and snapped by your phone, it isn’t hard to accumulate a lot of images of your life.  If you are anything like me, you have a lot of photographs.  So, I must ask you this: Have you given any thought to your photo storage?  Do you have a system for backing up photos?

If you don’t, let me make a case for you why you should.  If you do, well, you might want to read on too.  You might find something you haven’t considered before.
Let’s say you keep your pictures on your phone.  It’s where you took the photos, and when you want to show them to people you just whip your phone out.  But what happens when you… drop your phone in a puddle?  Or, heaven forbid, have it stolen?  What happens to all the pictures you took?  If you don’t have them backed up, I guarantee you, they’re probably lost to you.  Backing your photos up in multiple places means that there’s less of a risk of you loosing that visual history you’ve created.

First, some storage options:

  1. Your Phone/Camera/Camera Card: great for short term storage, but not very reliable in the long term.  Best to keep your photos somewhere else just in case.  Besides, small things like camera cards and phones can be easily lost.
  2. An App: There are a great many apps out there that can load your photos to some form of cloud storage.  Many, like Instagram, interface with places like Facebook.  Apps are a great, easy and quick way to get your photos off your phone or ipad or other device, and are great for sharing pictures with your friends.  However, apps are only as good as the services they interface with.
  3. Facebook: Facebook makes it easy to upload your photos to the web, and it’s a great way to share your photographs.  I have some problems with Facebook though.  When you upload your photos to Facebook, the image quality is greatly decreased.  This is done so the photo can load quickly on a page.  It also saves Facebook money because they don’t have to pay for as much storage.  This loss of quality becomes a drawback if you ever want to use a photo you got off Facebook and have it printed or enlarged.  You’ll find very quickly that the quality of the photo isn’t that great.  Also, be careful when you read the terms of service with Facebook.  At the time of writing this, Facebook can reuse any photograph you upload to them in any advertisement – without informing you or asking your permission (well, actually, you gave permission when you uploaded the photo).  This is something I’m not too keen on.
  4. Instagram: Instagram, like Facebook, makes it easy for you to take photographs, upload them and share them.  You retain better image quality than Facebook, which is a plus.  Unfortunately, Instagram doesn’t have the best history of valuing people’s rights to their photos, and over the summer was involved in a class-action lawsuit.  As another note, Facebook now owns Instagram, so I’d be super-aware to read their terms of service. Twice.
  5. Twitter/Twitpic: again, I’ll encourage you to read their terms of service.  It’s not much better than Facebook or Instagram.  Photo quality is normally somewhere between Facebook and Instagram, depending on the light and your camera.
  6. Flickr: Now, Flickr is a product I can get behind.  It has an app that makes it easy to upload photos from your phone/ipad/other tablet-like device.  It’s terms of service are great and they are really respectful about your rights to your photos.  When you upload your photos, you can choose what rights you want, either full copyright, or some version of the creative commons licence.  This, I think, is a wonderful thing.  Also, Flickr preserves your image quality, though if you upload in RAW (which is not applicable to anyone unless they have a DSLR camera) they will get turned into JPGS.  With Flickr now offering every user a free terabyte of storage, unless you are ridiculously prolific, you won’t run out of storage space.  I happen to have a paid account even though I don’t need it, because I really believe in supporting a service like Flickr. 
  7. Cloud storage: Cloud storage basically involves uploading your photos to somewhere on the web to store them.  While sometimes more cumbersome than a social media sharing site, cloud storage is an excellent option for preserving your photos.  There are many great cloud storage options, some good reviews of products available are here and here.  The advantages: cloud storage is pretty secure for photo storage use, you can access it anywhere you have an internet connection, you don’t loose any of the quality of your pictures, and the pictures remain solidly yours.  However, you loose some of the ease of backing up your photos.
  8. Your computer: This is a good place to store your photos, but has some of the same drawbacks as your phone, especially if you have a laptop.  If something physical happens to it, the photos can be gone.  It’s best to store them somewhere separate from your computer in case of a virus, accident, or theft.
  9. Thumb drives: good for the short term, thumb drives weren’t meant for long-term storage, and sometimes over time the data can degrade.  Plusses: They are smaller and easier to store.
  10. CD/DVD: a decent solution, but involves a fair amount of effort: you have to remember to write the pictures to the CD/DVD and then you have to store them somewhere.  Also, writing photos to CD/DVD’s takes time.  If you take a lot of pictures, this can build up.
  11. External Hard Drive: I tend to use this option, in addition to having my pictures on my computer and on Flickr.  I back up periodically, and the pictures are far less likely to go somewhere on an external, because you don’t typically carry them around.  They’ve become quite affordable, and unless you are affected by an earthquake or fire, nothing is probably going to happen to it.
So, how do you store your photos?  Leave me a note on Twitter, Facebook or the comments, I’d love to hear!

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.

Some Small Notes and Housekeeping

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I was speaking with my grandmother (who follows my blog, Hi Grandma!), and she told me I needed to put the dates with my post about The New England Fiber Festival.  She has a point.  The two classes I’m teaching, “Hairpin Lace Scarf in a Day” and “Crazy Mixed Up Slipped Stitches,” happen on November 2nd.  I hope to see you there!  More information about the classes is on The Big E Website.

A month or two ago, Sockupied returned my samples of Totem to me.  I put them away, thinking it would be good to keep the three socks nice, but today, in impulse, I had to get them out for something else, and I decided to wear them.  They feel amazing, though they were made for the model’s foot and not mine, so are a little roomy.  I’m hoping the first time I wash them they’ll tighten up a little.

I’ve a personal pattern that’s days away from being ready to be released.  If you are clever, you might be able to find some sneak peeks of it.  But because I’m nice, I’ll give you a little glimpse:

I’ve been engaged in a lively and enlightening chat on the Designers Forum of Ravelry.  You can find it here.  I’m thinking of writing a blog post to articulate some of my thoughts a little better.

Bleeding Socks: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

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Sock Siblings.

I have a pair of socks I made out of Blue Ridge Yarn’s Dragon’s Breath.  They’re… interesting socks to say in the least.  They are siblings – resembling each other in coloring, but in features very different… I was trying out two different ideas for sock patterns, both of which I was not quite happy with.  One of them I still am working on, the other pattern idea I trashed.

I knew they were going to bleed.  When I was working with them, they would leave a line of red on my finger where the yarn slid over my hand.  So, knowing this, I took them into the shower and used them as washcloths for a month, and each time I used them the red dye would go down the drain.  Finally, they seemed to be running clear, so I decided to dry them out and wear them.

Four Color catchers, arranged as they got lighter each soak.

I often have to double up on socks – I have poor circulation and my hands and feet are always cold.  The under-layer wicks moisture from my foot, the outer layer is wool, which keeps things warm.  It has an added benefit of mitigating the wear on my socks.

I wore my white under-layer socks with my Dragon’s Breath socks… and my under layer promptly got stained red.

Back into the shower the socks went.  This time, I also began soaking them in a bucket of hot water with a few Shout color catchers.  They’ve worked wonders, and after using a few of them, my socks haven’t bled since.  You can see that they took up quite a bit of dye – imagine if I had washed them with other things.

Well, coming off of the positive experience with the color catchers, I had a second pair of socks, these ones Crayon Box by Schaefer Yarns on Nichole.  Unfortunately, they are no longer selling yarns wholesale, though I hear a rumor that she is running a small outlet.  You can see a picture of me working on the yarn on a Train in India.  It’s bright and rainbow-like, and it filled me with delight as I was working with it.

You can see the pretty rainbow sock peeking out of my bag in the lower left corner.

It no longer is that bright.

Six color catchers, and they are all about the same color –
no tapering off as the dye gets out.

I had an inkling that the yarn might bleed a bit – I had gotten my knitting bag a bit wet and some of the blue from a strand of yarn transferred to a piece of paper.  But Schaefer has a really good reputation, so I figured that the yarn would only bleed a little bit.  I decided I could put a few color catchers in a bucket, like I did with the last socks, and that would be the end of the issue.  Presto!  Beautiful rainbow socks.

Not so much.

The blue has traveled quite a bit into the other colors.  Interestingly, when I soak them, the water comes out reddish, but when I wash them, the water comes out blueish.  So we’ve got several different colors that are bleeding.

So last night, feeling pretty frustrated, I put them into the bucket for another soak (I’d given up on the color catchers).  But just before I put them in, it occured to me – what if the bleed isn’t from excess dye?  What if it’s because the colors didn’t really fix in this pot?  What if there just wasn’t enough acid to do the work?

I added a generous slug of vinegar to the water (enough Michael smelled it two rooms over), and put the socks in – not really expecting much.

This is the socks this morning.

Can it be?  The water is clear?

See the water?  It’s clear.

Let me show you again.

Completely clear water.

Completely clear.

I am tentatively hopeful.  I’m going to give them a wear later this week as soon as they are dry, and see how they do.

Waiting on them to dry.  Still pretty, in their own way, but not really a rainbow.

The Taste of Fall: Apple-Water

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When I was a child, my mother would make applesauce with the four of us children.  We’d take turns cranking the food mill and separating the skins from the rest of the apple.  Once all the boiled apples had been scooped from the pot with a slotted spoon, there would be water, deliciously flavored with the taste of apple.  More dilute than apple-juice, but tasting more of cider, my mother would pour the warm liquid into four shot glasses and we’d share it between us.

More than anything else, the taste of apple water represents fall for me.  Cider you can buy all year round, nowadays.  But apple-water?  Only comes with homemade applesauce.

The other weekend we processed four burners worth of apples, my mother’s way.  Mom never took the skins off or took out the cores.  You just quartered the apples, and then boiled/steamed them until they were “fork soft.”  Michael and I did the same, and the apartment was roasting with the heat coming out of the kitchen.

Apples a-boil for applesauce and applebutter

We decided to add an extra step to our process.  When we spooned the apples out of the pot, we let them rest in a strainer with some cheesecloth for a couple minutes before moving them into the food mill.  At the end, we took the rest of the liquid and also ran it through the cheesecloth.  In addition to making applesauce that was a bit firmer in consistency (perfect for reducing down into applebutter!), we had the most lovely batch of apple-water.

When I say lovely, it was the nicest rose color, slightly opaque and delicious smelling.  I poured myself a nice tall glass, and went to sit out on the porch.  It made such a picture I had to share it with all of you.

Apple Water, a lovely rose color.

Stitching, other than Knitting and Crochet

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While Michael and I were in India, my backpack gave up the ghost.  I’d been babying it for a while, as the zipper had some weak spots where the toggle would jump the track.  But I’d been making it work.  While we were shopping one day, Michael was putting our purchases in the backpack, and being rather rough with it.  I told him, “Be careful, the zipper is delicate.”

He said, “I’ve got it.”

A moment later, he yanked and it broke broke.

Try as we might, that zipper pull wasn’t going back on the track.  In desperation, we cut a hole in the fabric to strap it shut with a length of twine, and I struggled not to be mad at him the rest of the day.

When we got home, we had one gift card left from the wedding that we hadn’t used.  We decided this was going to be used to buy me a new backpack.  So I looked for a new backpack.

Now, it must be said.  I’ve had this backpack for eight years.  It’s been with me since the first day of college, and has carried two computers, books, projects, and more things than I can count.  It’s been to Sweden, across the United States, to India, Norway, and I’ve carried it 5 days out of 7 for the last eight years.  I haven’t had a seam split or a strap break or anything. (It’s one of the higher end models by Jansport).  It has a place to put my computer, with ample padding and a shock absorbing insert on the bottom in case I drop it (which I’ve done a lot).  A roomy main pocket, a headphone pocket that is perfect for a pair of in-progress socks, and plenty of other pockets.

When I looked online, nothing fit.  None of the backpacks I could find (even the ones out of my price-range) had adequate padding.  The shoulder straps were wonky.  I wasn’t looking for much, but nothing fit.  After hitting up multiple stores to look at backpacks in person, and searching online more than I cared to admit, it occurred to me that I might be happier if I just replaced the zipper myself.

So I went digging in my stash of zippers (as my grandmother threw nothing away, and this included clipping buttons and zippers out of everything). Miracle upon miracle, I found a jacket zipper that worked (it means that instead of zipping out from the middle, it zips out from the sides) and fit the hole.

Below follows the process of resurrecting the backpack, if you ever are interested in doing the same:

I unpicked the stitches to the zipper on one side.  On the other side (the part with the red zipper flap) the seam also
held the zipper flap, so I just sewed the new zipper flush to the old zipper.  This worked surprisingly well.
A simple running stitch made in super-tiny stitches worked really well.  I used a bright color for my eyes, and because
 when making repairs of this nature, I had no ability to hide the repair, so might as well make it a design feature, right?
New zipper lying flush to old zipper.
Patience is a virtue.  Halfway through I realized that I’d sewn the zipper in with a twist, had to unpick it and re-sew it.
The cats could not stop staring at me the whole time.  Thread, flicking and moving and
oh-so-pounce-able, and they got spritzed every time they tried to go for it.
Zipper nearly finished, working as it should.

I love the Northeast – and soon I’ll be there Teaching at The New England Fiber Festival!

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I was talking with my sister, Rosemary, the other day.  Rosemary and I are six years apart, and in many ways that is no time at all, but when it comes to childhood memories factors in quite a bit.  She had few memories of the years we lived in Leominster, MA, or Vincent, OH.  Since the time she was five or six, we’ve lived in New York, just outside of Albany, and for her, she will always have come from New York.

Either a function of being the oldest, or just having a better memory, I have many more memories of my time living in Massachusetts.  And even after we moved away, I considered myself from there, as each year I’d go to camp in the summer in the Berkshires.  In many ways, my heart still is that of a New England-er, and each year about this time, when I know that the hills of the Berkshires are on fire with the leaves.  Now, Maryland has some decent trees that turn color, but it isn’t the same.  The varieties of apples available are a different breed, and the air just feels different.

Hairpin Lace Scarf we’ll be working on!

I guess everyone has to have something they are crotchety about.

It’s for that reason I’m so excited that, in two short weeks, I’ll be teaching at the New England Fiber Festival.  It is almost like returning home.  I’ll be a stone’s throw away from one of the first LYS’s I was ever exposed to, Webs and Northampton Wool, and a couple of miles away from my grandmother and my cousins.  I’ll be teaching 2 classes: “Hairpin Lace Scarf in a Day” and “Crazy Mixed-Up Slipped Stitches.”

I am SO excited.

If you are from the area, I hope to see you there.  And if you aren’t, share the news with someone you know!  The more the merrier!

The Benefits of Doing Something Yourself

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Picking herbs at an open farm day at our
farm share, Spiral Path Farms.

Michael and I have promised ourselves that this is the last week of apple processing.  Really.  We’d promised ourselves that it was going to be the last 2 weeks ago, but I was tempted by a crate of apples for $25 (it worked out to be less than $1 per lb, which is a great price in these parts!) and have been drying apples for camping and snacking.  Michael on the other hand found a few coworkers who wanted to buy apple butter off of him, and Michael was only too willing to sell jars to them.  So he, also, is replenishing the stock of canned things.  At the end of this, we will have processed more than 150 lbs of apples… quite frankly, it probably was more.  And after we finish the apples?  We’re going to try our hand at cheese and yogurt.

A couple of our friends have questioned our sanity, spending so much time canning and preserving when things are much cheaper and less time-consuming if you buy them at the grocery store.  However, when I talk about canning and such with knitters and crocheters, I receive far less of that attitude.  I think knitters and crocheters “get it” far more than others.  Why?  Because we all see the benefits to doing things ourselves.  So for those of you stumped by the stitchers, canners, or other DIY people out there, here’s a list of reasons why we love taking the time to do it ourselves.

Our apple peeler, slicer and corer.  I love it.
  • You know what is in it.  When you are canning fruits and vegetables, you have control of every little thing you put in the jar.  It can be exactly the way you want it.  The same thing with knitting and crocheting.  You have control over the yarn and it’s contents, the pattern, fit, style and feel of the fabric.  Either way, you can make intentional choices about what goes into the final product.
  • You know where it’s come from.  In the same way you have control over what you create, you have control over the object’s origins.  For food, that means I can choose the freshest, best ingredients.  If I want organic, I can procure organic food.  If you make your own sweater, you can choose what yarn you want, and you can make informed choices about how it is sourced.  Since you are the one making the garment, you know it was made in ethical conditions.  If you want to support the local economy, you can choose yarn that is made entirely in the United States (Like Shepherd’s Wool) or a local dyer (like Dragonfly Fibers, for me).
  • I find a meditative quality to making my own things.  The repetition of stitch stacking upon stitch.  The motion as I crank applesauce through our food mill.  There is a thoughtfulness and deliberateness to doing the same thing over and over, where it acquires more meaning because there’s more thought and deliberation put into each step.  Or maybe it’s just me.  I’ve always liked repetitive tasks.
  • There’s satisfaction in doing something yourself.  On our fridge, we have a magnet that reads, “I eat Local, because I CAN.”  It’s both a reminder and a boast.  We eat local, because we can and preserve.  We also eat local because we are fortunate enough to have access to local produce. Either way, it’s a boast, because when it comes down to it, there’s something really satisfying when you pop open the top to something you canned yourself and you make a meal out it.  I get the same feeling when I knit or crochet.  There’s something incredibly satisfying about having someone compliment something you made and being able to say, “Thank you. I made it.”  The socks that I made myself are warmer, even if it’s only my imagination.  The food that I can myself is tastier, even if it’s just because I remember making it.
What, aside from stitching, do you find satisfaction doing on your own?  Let me know on Twitter, Facebook or in the comments below!

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