As an editor of Bellaonline I get newsletters announcing articles from other editors and one I recently received from the Spinning Editor about Journaling your spinning caused me to create this article.

I am a process knitter and have unfinished and finished objects in my past and future. One thing I do is keep of journal of finished projects with a picture of it, and one thing I’m starting to do is keep one when I first start a project. This journal eventually will hold all the information about a finished project when it is complete, but it is a place to start.

First, find a looseleaf binder, they have the advantage of holding swatches and odd shaped items nicely. I use a simple lined sheet of paper with the following information on it:

The name of the project, i.e. Baby Sweater for Adam.
The size I’m knitting.
The yarn I am using.
The name of the pattern, if there is one. (Sometimes I keep the pattern copy here too when the project is finished.)
The name of the pattern stitch used if it isn’t included in the pattern (or if I changed it from the pattern, or if I added one to the pattern-most likely).
Where I got the pattern stitch from, to streamline finding it again.
The needle size I used. All the sizes used if I changed them at any point in time. Often the case when moving from ribbing to the body of a garment.
In a plastic bag that seals, the Swatch and possibly a sample of the yarns used, attach this to the page. (Sometimes when I’m being so efficient I don’t recognize myself I attach a tag to the swatch with the name of the project and yarn on it in case it gets separated from my lined page.)
The gauge I got in my swatch, and whether that gauge matched the pattern gauge (often when I am knitting I find that the swatch I’m knitting looks great, but is not the right size. So via the magic of mathematics I make a different size of the pattern to get the finished size that matches my gauge, but that is a different topic.)
Any notes to the changes I make to the pattern.
A picture of the finished project.

I enclose all of this in a plastic page protector and slip it in my binder.

One other way of doing all of this is to use the project page on Ravelry if you have a Ravelry sign on. The journal I keep has much, if not all, of the information they ask for also, but as big a Ravelry fan as I am, and I’m a big fan, I like to have a hard copy of all of my stuff and not rely on an internet source to store it. If Ravelry allowed you to download all of the information you enter, this would be perfect, but in the meantime I’ll keep my binder.