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Marlinspike Seamanship – A Sailor’s Craft

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Marlinspike. [mar-lin-spyk] noun: the tool utilized by a sailor to manipulate rope for splicing ropes and working out touch knots.

Marlinspike seamanship is a catch-phrase for a level of proficiency a sailor has achieved in knowing their knots, splices, and uses of various lines, traditionally on a sailing vessel.  By utilizing these techniques, skilled sailors are able to transcend the operational use of their lines, and generate beautiful knotwork that can be both functional and art.

With a strong sailing background, marlinspike seamanship was a craft in which I have dabbled in on and off for many years now.  While nowhere near the level of proficiency of experts in the craft like Des Pawson, I’ve crafted a variety of items like door mats/block mats, and smaller knick knack crafts.  As an art, I’ve found that this type of use of rope is in many ways similar to that of crochet: the marlinspike is akin to a crochet hook, and you only have one running piece of line while you’re creating the item.  Unlike crochet, however, many of these ropework patters are planned out from start to finish before you even start, as they are worked from the end of the rope, in a way more like weaving as the rope is threaded over and under and around itself.


As a craft which as been around in its’ traditional form for centuries, there are any number of resources available to the budding seaman, from the lore of weathered sailors on vessels in a marina, to countless websites available in the craft.  There are also a good number of well written books that are worth checking our or purchasing as well.  Two that I highly recommend are written by Harvey Garrett Smith: The Marlinspike Sailor and The Arts of the Sailor: Knotting, Spicing and Ropework.  In Sailor, Smith provides plenty of detailed, full-page diagrams for complicated knots, splices, and patterns, and easily outlines the movements of the sometimes plethora of lines that are required to turn a jumbled mass of hemp into a beautiful finished product.  In Arts, Smith weaves a tale of how practical elements of knotwork on a sailing vessel because the decorative elements we see today, interspersing the story with diagrams, tips, and patterns for making some of the items he refers to.

Not commonly thought of in the fiber arts community, marlinspike seamanship is an age-old tradition with many parallels in history to it’s more domestic peers of knit, crochet, and weaving.  Certainly a facet of crafting worth exploring for it’s own beauty.

From the Business Desk: Leveraging your Strengths

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From the Business Desk is back.  From the Business Desk is a semi-regular series that looks at some of the important factors in running a Small Fiber Arts Business.  This feature revolves around market evaluation, and some tips to find the right niche for your business.

As any small business owner knows, it’s a fierce world out there to break into any market.  Be it establishing a LYS, becoming your own design company, breaking into the teaching circuit, all of these arenas seem to have well established entities that have solid client bases that seem to have everything put together.  How will you ever be able to differentiate your new business and your ideas from the existing market, you may ask yourself.  One of the handiest tricks of the business trade to help you accomplish this is the SWOT analysis.  Standing for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats, this analysis can help you start to make sense of your business’s place in the market, and areas which you can develop to better differentiate and market your ideas.

SWOT Matrix overview.  Image courtesy of wikipedia.org

Fitting neatly into a 2 x 2 matrix (one of my favorite visualizations for many different business strategies), the SWOT analysis can help you identify some key attributes both about your business as well as the marketplace.

Strengths are the things that your business does quite well or has a key competitive factor; items could include physical location of a shop in a high-traffic downtown area, or having a well rounded resume of instruction at a variety of locations.

Weaknesses are known areas where you could use some improvement; an example of this could be that you don’t really possess a strong skill-set on computer tools like Excel or Microsoft Publisher as a designer.

Opportunities are areas that in your opinion the market or industry has not fully realized, such as there being a wealth of crocheters living in a particular town, but no dedicated crochet instructor.

Threats can be anything externally that stands the chance of impeding the growth and progress of your business.  Threats can be micro, such as the fact that there is already a teacher who has been teaching a particular class that you want to start teaching at a regional fair, or macro, such as the overall state of the retail yarn market in a particular state.
Remember, these should be fairly high-level; while it’s good to have an in-depth analysis of your business and the market, for the first time that you do this exercise, try to distill it down to the top three or four attributes in each category.

Once you have developed your ideas and thoughts, it’s time to tweak the matrix to help understand how this can lead to a strong business plan development.

SWOT action item Matrix

By combining each of these categories in a grid, you can identify specific action items that emerge from the attribute clusters.  The two most important areas to be aware of and consider are the Strength-Opportunities  and the Weakness-Threat quadrants.  These two reflect the immediate areas for business development and defense strategy respectively.

Breaking down your businesses’ market position utilizing the SWOT analysis, you can simply and easily lay the groundwork for a comprehensive business plan that can help you take advantage of market opportunities.  One final note about the SWOT analysis; it is not meant to be a static market.  Over time, both your business strengths and weaknesses as well as your perceived opportunities and threats in the market can significantly change.  It’s a good idea to review and update this grid on a regular schedule (here at Tinking Turtle we review our SWOT items quarterly and develop a new SWOT matrix annually).  By doing this, you can ensure that you are aware of where you need to focus your business development objectives for the near future.

~ Mr. Turtle

From the Business Desk: Finishing Projects

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After a delay due to some career changes that Jen talked about earlier, From the Business Desk is back.  From the Business Desk is a semi-regular series that looks at some of the important factors in running a Small Fiber Arts Business.  This feature revolves around ensuring that all of your business projects have fully completed.


As a small business owner, staying on top of everything necessary to run your business is no small task.  With a constant turmoil of new projects, new customers, and everyday business inquiries, it is important to understand what is required for you to close out your existing projects; by successfully and formally closing out a project, it can be put to rest with all parties comfortable that their requirements have been met.

Not all Project Management needs to be this complicated. A few
simple tips can keep you on track to successful completion.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gantt_chart

One of the first items to be aware of in the closing stage of a project is that it’s important to identify up front what the final items on your project or to-do list are.  For example, if you are working on establishing and running a new class at your shop, you may think that the project is complete when the class runs.  Thinking this out ahead of time can help you identify  items that are always good to check off before putting a project to bed  Namely, ensuring that all compensation and contractual terms have been met and a project post-mortem to document lessons learned.  Following through with these steps ensures that you don’t forget some of the important elements of a project for any business: getting paid, and meeting legal obligations.  A post-mortem, either publicly or internally is a good time for one or more parties involved to learn from the project, documenting what went well and what could use improvement for next time.

This is an example of using Insightly to keep track of project tasks.
This is the project list for the pattern Sweet Strawberries.

Keeping track of all of this can be overwhelming; fortunately there are several options available that are easy to use in web form.  I’d recommend ZOHO Projects or Freedcamp as two of the better solutions available out there for someone just getting started.  Other options include systems that link Customer Relationship Management and Project Management.  Here at Tinking Turtle, our CRM system, Insightly includes an integrated Project Management module.  This provides additional functionality to link projects to various associated parties, and track when a project is waiting on a third party to take action.

No matter how extensive or basic your knowledge of projects is, ensuring that you take some time on all of your projects to double check that your steps are completed is well worth the peace of mind..  The more projects that can be completed without final steps left un-done, the easier managing the entire workload of your business can be.

~ Mr. Turtle

Idea of Thirds for Online Content

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This is the next edition of a semi-regular series From the Business Desk I am writing to look at some of the important factors in running a Small Fiber Arts Business.  This feature revolves around some ideas and concepts that you can use when posting content online and via social media.

Driving content to any website or blog isn’t easy.  Especially with the proliferation of social media and so-called link aggregation sites like Buzzfeed or Tumblr, online viewers are faced with an overwhelming amount of content to sift through.  How can you, the publisher, rise above the noise, and provide your audience with a healthy variety of content to keep them engaged and continuing to return to your site?  Social Media giant Facebook has some analysis from their experience, much of it is good advice: ask questions, vary your style, and keep up your volume.

In terms of content, however, there’s a quick little memonic that I’ve always believed in to help you not only have varied style and volume, but different topics as well.  I think this is particularly apropos for the fiberarts industry, where so much of the culture and community is derived from sharing new ideas and teaching others’ new tips and techniques. It’s called the Idea (or rule) of Thirds for Online Content.  It goes like this:

1/3 of your content should be Informational
1/3 should be Instructional
1/3 should be Personal

Here at Tinking Turtle, we try (and emphasis on try given life’s challenges as mentioned before) to come up with a monthly posting schedule and theme, and then break down the posts based on these buckets.

This is our Posting Schedule for last November.  Note the other topics for me at the bottom… I’m just now getting to writing about the Idea of Thirds!

Each of these buckets can engage a different set of readers, or engage frequent readers in different ways.  The Informational grouping for content can encompass topics such as reviews of new patterns, new yarns, new books, or other knowledge based topics that you the poster want to share with your audience, for example this post you’re reading!  Instructional topics are pretty straight forward, and engage the folks’ who peruse your site hoping to learn something new (like Jen’s Embroidering with Crochet piece) or with a question to be answered.  Instructional topics can also lead into a more active offline engagement with readers, as once they have learned a technique or style they may want to pursue that with you through one on one interactions or even taking an in depth class.

Personal topics are topic matter most commonly associated with blogs; they are stories, experiences, and musings of the poster (such as my German Restaurant post about the origins of the Tinking Turtle name from last year) and add a human element to a website.  Readers want to know they are dealing with people, not robots, and having this down to earth content helps drive that connection to keep them coming back.

There are any number of ways you can break down posting content to achieve variety to provide engaging and provoking content.  The Idea of Thirds is one great concept to keep in the back of your mind when contemplating your online content, whatever the platform, going forward!

~ Mr. Turtle

Technology and Organization: How to stay on top of your files.

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This is the next edition of a semi-regular series From the Business Desk I am writing to look at some of the important factors in running a Small Fiber Arts Business.  This month’s feature revolves around using some technology solutions to manage the data and documents your business creates.
In today’s technological age, more and more business documents are being created, transmitted, and stored solely in an electronic format.  Gone are the days of massive file rooms and large physical filing cabinets full of records; for small businesses in particular, digital storage is a booming need.  Being able to store and organize documents smartly is a crucial aspect of any business operation, and the time and effort saved through organization can make a real difference for a business of one or two employees.  This is especially true for fiber arts design shops, where the products, patterns, and media being created comprise the bulk of the value for the business.
For the small business today, there are a wealth of resources available, ranging from free to very cost effective.  These resources are able to store documents in a manner where they can be easily accessible to the business, yet secure and organized to protect the data.  Cloud storage, available through Google, Apple, or Dropbox, to name but a few, can initially be used for free.  This online storage can be accessed anywhere that you have an internet connection.
More locally is the emerging concept of a Personal Cloud.  A personal cloud is a hybrid setup of storage; a cross between an internet based Cloud Storage service and a personal hard drive attached to a computer.  Also known technically as Network Attached Storage (NAS), this technology solution allows you to create, save, and share documents locally within your own business or home network.  
Tinking Turtle’s Personal Cloud looks like any Windows file structure, and
is organized and accessible across multiple computers.

Tinking Turtle has recently set up our own Personal Cloud system to store all of our business data including design information, contracts, and other important documents, in one simple, easy to access location that any computer on our business network can connect to.  This allows us to categorize and file designs and other business documents in an organized, hierarchical manner, while still preserving the ability to share these among members of the business.

Personal Cloud providers such as Western Digital or Seagate now offer affordible data storage solutions with a wide range of features, including automatic backups, audio and video streaming services, and even the ability to access documents anywhere across the internet.  This functionality offers small businesses a key competitive advantage, as by being organized with your company data, you are better able to use your available resources.

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