This knitting the weather project, wherein one selects a range of yarn colors to represent different types of weather, and then knit a row a day in the appropriate color, really appeals to me. I could see doing this for other types of record keeping as well, such as knitting a row each night for the number of hours I spent working that day, or how far I ran, or just a general quality-of-day-to-color mapping. But the low-tech data visualization aspect of it really tickles me.
But I already have an obsessive knitting project going – I am working through all of the patterns in the sampler in Knitting Lace. The patterns are gleaned from a mid-1800s German lace sampler. I’ve never knit with thread before, but I went with size 10 and it’s actually no harder than thread crochet. One clever thing I thought to do was to, between patterns, run a piece of contrasting thread through my stitches before starting the next pattern. This way, when I totally misunderstand the new pattern, I can easily rip back to my last stopping point without worrying about dropped stitches. I’m on pattern 13 right now and over halfway through a 1000 yard ball of thread – fortunately I am hooked or I would be starting to rethinking the magnitude of this project.