Writing specs; knitting to weave

I am stymied in my attempts to weave doubleweave until I can get the wood pieces to enlarge my sectional beam, so I am working on other projects for the time being.  (I have called a woodworker about it, but they haven’t called me back yet; I’ll do another round of phone calls on Monday.)

I have done some more investigation into Drupal, and am frustrated by the steep learning curve and the poor documentation of most of the modules.  So I have found myself a Drupal expert who will go through my specs and translate them into Drupal architecture, give me a list of modules to use and some basic instructions, and let me work on it from there.  She isn’t too expensive, which is good, since this is a pro bono project on my part and my budget for it is strictly limited.  This is exactly the kind of help I need!

Of course, the downside is that now I have to write specs.  This is a fairly complex project, on par with the contract job I did for Balsam Hill.  The spec for that site is 20-30 pages long, and there are at least 10-15 pages of wireframes.  Not un-do-able, just takes time.  So I better get to work on it.  I need Visio and am working on buying it through a friend who is a full-time student (academic pricing).  Meanwhile it’s pen, paper, and use cases.  Not the most exciting thing to do, but (speaking as a professional project manager here) if you don’t have a concrete idea of what you want to build, you’re doomed.

B. and I are going on a long ride today, 50-60 miles, but after that I hope to get to work.

In other news, I thought of an interesting idea for weaving.  Take a machine knitted blank (rectangle of knitted fabric), dye it, and then use it in weaving.  If you time it so that the unraveled yarn in each row is the same as the length of the weft for each row, you could conceivably get painted-weft effects that would be really neat.

As with everything under the sun, however, this idea is not original.  There’s a woman in the East Bay doing just that, and offering custom knitted blanks for sale.  This intrigues me; I’d like to pursue it further, but I should live so long as to do everything I’d like to do.  I’m back-burnering it for now, but keeping it on tap should I decide to do interesting warp-and-weft painted effects.  Painted horizontal stripes!  Now that’s a cool idea.

So many cool things to do, so little time!

Finally, I have received and accepted a job offer from Electrotank, and given notice at my old company.  What a relief!  I will start there in two weeks.