Innovation Update

Kate
from the UK has sent a lead on something that’s even better than the
narrow sticky notes I wrote about yesterday. She points us at
removable, translucent highlighter tape.

It’s
inexpensive. Even better, it comes in several widths and lots of
colors, and is packaged as either sheets of removable strips or in
dispensers like adhesive tape. From a quick product search, it appears
to be most widely used by teachers and professors for book
highlighting, and by pilots for annotating aviation charts. A Google
search on "highlighter tape" or "highlight tape" turns up a bunch of
sources. Here are several sources that has a pretty complete listing of
the available form factors (no affiliation):

http://www.windmillworks.com/catalog/c1_p1.html
http://www.crystalspringsbooks.com/products.asp?dept=333
http://www.avidaviator.com/tape.html

Some
advantages include transparency – being able to "look ahead" in your
pattern without displacing the mark, and availability in assorted
colors. Why colors? Two reasons. First, some charts come in color. One
might need to find a contrasting highlight to avoid "wiping out" one or
more colors shown on the chart. Second, I’m no educational or visual
perception theorist, but I know there are people who find reading much
easier if they view pages through colored filters. I wouldn’t be
surprised if some of the chart-shy have perceptual wiring that would
benefit from using color highlights, too.

I’ll be looking for this stuff to try out.

More goodies in office supply stores

I’ve
written about knitting tools that can be found in hardware stores. Now
this train of thought takes me on another mental shopping trip – tools
that can be found in office supply stores. Some are obvious:

• Drawing/drafting
  supplies – rulers, protractors, French curves, graph paper, tape
  measures, cartographer’s measures (people who do full scale dimensioned
  drawings and slopers might find these useful)
• Calculators of all sorts
• Filing supplies – sheet protectors, binder and loose files
• Tote
  bags – Some of the smaller computer bags and the not-quite-briefcases
  meant for file-toting road warriors make excellent stealth knitting
  bags.
• Organizers – In-drawer, in-briefcase, and desktop organizers can be handy to corral knitting doodads
• Typing stands – Great for propping up charts or leaflets

Some are less obvious. Here’s a smattering of the latter:

Transparencies
– clear plastic pages that can be run through printers or copying
machines. Need to grid up a picture or photo? Print a transparent sheet
up with a graphed lines in the same height:width ratio as your knitting
gauge. Lay that clear line-printed sheet over the image you want to
transcribe to knitting. Voila! Instant knitting graph.

Circular paper clips – Instant stitch markers.

Check files – Yet another possible solution for storing those circs.

Tomorrow – another wish list item.