Twyste

This week as I link up with Ginny’s yarn along, I’m not contributing my knitting progress.  Nope, I’m contributing a little techy tidbit that you will find super helpful in organizing your knitting patterns, etc.

I find that when I’m visiting people’s sites and checking out their patterns, I often want to save them for later (you know, when I’ll have more time…!).  I expect this is true for others as well.  Up until recently the way I did that was to bookmark the site or just leave it open in my browser until eventually I gave up and closed it thinking I’d be able to find it again later.  Not any more, though; now I have a new and improved method.  This is where my techy contribution comes in.

Evernote.  I’ve written posts about Evernote in the past explaining what it is and going on about all its wonderfulness.  If you aren’t familiar with Evernote, read those two posts and then get it up and going on your computer, phone, tablet, whatever, because you should be using it.  Then read on to learn a cool new trick.

My post today is to demonstrate how easy it is to add things to your Evernote library by simply emailing it.  Yep, you heard me.  If you can send an email, you can do this…  and, all your pattern memory will be neatly organized in one folder (or more, if you are an über organizer).

It’s very simple.  Evernote allows you to email pages to yourself.  You will be given an email address which you can use to send items directly into your Evernote notebooks.  Here’s what’s cool, though.  If you type the right stuff in the subject line of your email, it will cause the item to be placed in the correct notebook and even tagged for easy location!

For example, I have notebooks with exciting titles such as: blogging, knitting, teaching, recipes, ideas… and so on.  If I want an item I email to be placed in my knitting notebook, I simply type @knitting in the subject line.  If I want it to be in my recipes notebook, I type @recipes.  For further organization, I have been tagging my items as well.  I add tags such as:  patterns, drinks, cowls, web 2.0, coding… and so on.  To add a tag on an item I’m emailing, I just type a # in front of the tag name like so: #patterns or #drinks.

So, let me show you an example from today’s yarn along.  Ginny mentioned her cowl she’s begun and she was nice enough to include a link to the pattern.  I clicked on the link and liked the pattern, but didn’t want to buy it right now because I already have a thousand things I’m working on.  I didn’t want to forget about it though, so I added it to my Evernote library by emailing it to my account (in this particular case, the pattern was on Ravelry, so I actually could have saved it there too- I go on and on about how cool Ravelry.com is right here.).

This is what my email looked like.

All I did was go to the File menu of my web browser (I believe it’s the same on Macs and PCs) and click that I wanted to Mail Contents of This Page.  It then presented me with an email form (shown above), which I addressed to my Evernote account and filled in the subject line as I described above.  As you can see, my subject line indicated that I wanted it added to the knitting notebook, with the tags cowl, pattern, knitting, ravelry, and yarn (@knitting #cowl #pattern #knitting # ravelry #yarn).  Now, when I go to my Evernote library (on my computer, phone, or iPad), that note is filed in my knitting notebook.

It’s really easy and it works.  Let me know if you give it a try and need any help!  It really is a great way to organize… and it’s FREE!