Beeminding a specific craft project

Greetings! I am struggling with figuring out how to set up a specific craft goal (as opposed to the generalised beeminding of doing crafts, which I have posted about before).

Setup: I will be making a motif for a blanket for each book I read this year. Thus, about 250 motifs will need to be made in the year as a whole. I will only need to make motifs once I’ve read a book start to finish, so the rate will be highly variable.

So! I need some kind of goal that knows when I have a motif to make, and enforces me doing so within a reasonable length of time (3 days being the arbitrary amount I came up with). I thought about a flat line, and then using IFTTT to add a datapoint of -1 whenever I enter a datapoint on my reading goal, but that would require me to make the motif within the day to avoid derailing, and that’s not super practical.

It’s possible I’m missing some kind of obvious way to set this up. Nonetheless, I’m stuck. Halp?

(For more info on the project, a blog post.)

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Just to make sure the dirt simple solution doesn’t work: If you know you’ll need at least 250 (or at the very least 200, or some such number like that) then what about just beeminding it the old-fashioned way? Straight up do-more where you add a +1 when the motif makes it onto the blanket. Give it a week or a month of safety buffer to start with to avoid having a blanket beemergency without the corresponding book having been read. If the book reading is beeminded too, then that should mostly work. Although I agree it would be super cool to have the goal automatically dependent on the book reading.

This also reminds me of fractional beeminding, as @bee describes here:

(Fractional beeminding is also recapped in this delightful old blog post on bucketminding)

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How about the following:

Have a slope of 1.
Every day, if you don’t have a motif to make and are in a beemergency, add a datapoint of 1. (Think of this as “all caught up for today.”)
Use IFTTT to add a 3 datapoint whenever you enter a datapoint on your reading goal. Now you’re caught up for 3 days but you can’t enter a datapoint until you make the motif.

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Ooh! Yes, that seems like something I could do (and I prefer over @dreev’s idea just because it won’t fall over if I stop reading for a while because of x or y calamity, which has happened).

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Whoops, I just realised I didn’t say thank you for that idea, @zedmango! The yarn arrived today, so I’m going to get this set up in the next day or so and see how it goes.

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Awesome! Post your motifs here!

The first one is done! For The Bell at Sealey Head, a fantasy book (turquoise) which I bought in 2015 (“bottle”)

Three more pending so far…

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Oh what’s the color/shape/year code?

I’m going to do a full post about it soon with the colour palette for my blog, but I’m impatient so I’ll let you guys on the forums have the sneak preview! :smiley: (Shape is all hexagons, so that they can be easily joined to each other in order for the blanket.)

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@shanaqui

I looked at the survivor page and now I’m seriously curious about your UFOs! Are you an extraterrestrial :open_mouth:

You don’t know it from me alright but shanaqui belongs to an alien race of blue bunnies and was sent together with four other agents to earth as a spy to prepare their invasion. My lead says mission’s code name is OMNOM. The agents secret handles are Biscuit, Breakfast B… I gotta go they spotted me! Never forget!

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Haha blue bunny ETs! Watch out!

By the way I can’t believe @shanaqui named 3/4 bunnies after food!

At least half ET, yep. My aunt always says my dad just suddenly appeared in a cot in the front room, so it’s obvious where he came from. :slight_smile: The UFOs goal is actually “unfinished objects”, aka the half-dozen blankets and misc projects I have lying around unfinished (or in some cases, unbegun).

@phi, better run. Hulk’s after you. …Slowly. Nope, wait, she got distracted by a banana*. You’re good.

(We have two other bunny names saved up: Midnight Snack and Elevenses. We did actually meet a potential Midnight and Elevenses when we chose Biscuit and Eclair, but the latter two were keener on humans, which is pretty important for how much they hang out with us. So there’s still a Midnight Snack and an Elevenses somewhere in my future. Also I’d like to note that at least half of the bunny naming system is totally my wife’s fault.)

 

*Wooden. She’s not allowed much banana anymore because it’s so sugary. Same with carrot. Which I’m pretty convinced means she’s shortly going to topple this cruel human regime.

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Who’s ready for an update on this!

So, adding 3 for each book was basically making it so I never had to catch up right through January, and I got a bit behind. It’s now been amended to 2 for each book read, and I’m about to catch up tonight. As for updates, I’m up to 17 motifs total and it’s enough to give more of an idea how the final thing is going to look, so I’ll post a picture in the next day or so.

shanaqui.commits.to/update_thread_with_book_blanket_photo

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Here we go! And if you’re curious, read them across left-to-right:

x The Bell at Sealey Head: fantasy + 2015 backlog = turquoise + bottle
x To Davy Jones Below: mystery + 2018 backlog = claret + petrol
x Breaking the Maya Code: history + 2018 backlog = gold + petrol
x Murder Most Unladylike: mystery + acquired this year = claret + boysenberry
x Molecules at an Exhibition: science + 2018 backlog = lobelia + petrol
x Stitches in Time: history + library book = gold + emperor
x What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape: misc non-fiction + acquired this year = spring green + boysenberry
x Shades of Milk and Honey: romance + fantasy + reread = bright pink + turquoise + emperor
x Ninja: history + library = gold + emperor
x The Goblin Emperor: fantasy + reread = turquoise + emperor
x Band Sinister: romance + historical fiction + 2018 backlog = bright pink + spring green + petrol
x The Cobbler’s Boy: historical fiction + mystery + 2018 backlog = spring green + claret + petrol
x Hidden Sun: DNF + fantasy + ARC = white + turquoise + emperor
x Seahenge: history + library = gold + emperor
x How Do We Look / The Eye of Faith: history + library = gold + emperor
x Kill the Queen: fantasy + bought this year = turquoise + boysenberry
x 4th Rock from the Sun: science + 2018 backlog = lobelia + petrol

It’s 1050mm wide. I plan to keep it at that width and let it grow and see what happens; I may have to go back up one side or something if I read more than I’m expecting and it gets comical.

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What’s white/DNF? And what does ARC mean?

DNF means “did not finish” – I read over half the book, so I included it in the blanket as part of the reading journey, but I never actually read it all the way through. ARC = “advanced reader’s copy”; as a blogger, I sometimes get free copies of books before they come out in order to review them/give them pre-release-date publicity.

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WHAT A COOL PROJECT!! I really love this! I’m glad you’ve found a way to beemind it, too :slight_smile: The colours make for a really cool blanket together – though I’m curious to see what the white looks like as a background as it all comes together. Have you made something like this before?

Well, it depends on what you mean. I’ve made blankets before… This one was my very first, made from scraps of yarn from my late nan’s stash. It is, in retrospect… well I hope the friend I gave it to keeps it fondly IN A CUPBOARD.

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And some of them have been pretty darn big (this is a queen-size bed, and that was not the final size of the blanket):

image

But no data visualisation type things before.

The white border is much more visible/obvious now I’ve got a third row almost fully joined, and I’ve figured out how I’m doing the outside border, so stay tuned in the next few days for more pictures of something that looks very like the finished product, only smaller…

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Why, does your friend sleep in a cupboard like Harry Potter at the Dursleys’?

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