3:00 IN THE MORNING

Posted by Peg in South Carolina

My E-sketchbook is both a blessing and a curse. It allows me to wake up in the middle of the night and open it up. So much for sleep. But it allows me to get my ideas down in a format that is much more useful to me than simply taking linear notes, especially in my pretty much illegible handwriting.

The two pages above are the result of a recent middle-of-the-night awakening.

One thing I was easily able to do, because this is a computer and not a physical notebook, is to pull out from another page an idea that I thought might be useful to the current thinking these pages applies to. Copying and pasting is the greatest!

The images and notes in the upper left hand corner of the second page were pulled from an earlier page I noticed as I was skimming through this sketchbook. And I didn’t have to bring those in by copying each item one by one. I simply held down the shift key, clicked on each of the items and so created a group which I could move as a group. I can ungroup them any time I want. This is one of the nice gimmicks of Microsoft Publisher.

The items on the bottom half of the second page are also grouped, at least temporarily. They belong together. But should I want to move any one of them, I can easily ungroup them.

Another thing I have started to do is use two different type faces. I use plain Times New Roman for stuff that is pretty much purely technical or for things that I need/want to do. But I use a script type (Viner Hand ITC) for the idea notes. I had begun by doing all the notations in script simply because it looked attractive. But I thought the visual separation of the notes through typography might be more useful.

I do not make a point of making entries on a daily basis, though I had planned to do this. But keeping this sketchbook, even erratically, is proving to be enormously useful.

Another thing I have done in the hopes of making this e-sketchbook more useful is to create a kind of table of contents at the beginning of the book. I thought that I would just list some of the things in the sketchbook. I assume that someday I will have multiple sketchbooks and I want to try to make things a bit easier to find. Of course, a lot of the value of the sketchbook is simply browsing through it randomly.

But now I have started to add page numbers to some of the items to make it easier to find things. I am up to 19 pages and will probably have a fair number more before I decide to start a second sketchbook.

By the way, the faint gray lines that surround all the entries do not print. They are simply the guidelines for what is being entered into them.

Related Posts:
Latest Entries in Sketchbook
Software for E-Sketchbooks

“3:00 in the Morning” was written by Margaret Carpenter for Talking about Weaving and was originally posted on June 4, 2009. ©2009 Margaret Carpenter aka Peg in South Carolina