January ruminations

At the start if January, I had intended posting my New Year's Resolutions. And then, by the time we were back from travels over the festive period and into the new year, the kids had gone back to school, and general business, it somehow didn't happen. This does mean that my New Year's resolutions have distilled themselves into a more manageable list.

So here goes, these are my slightly belated New Year's Resolutions.

1. Read 26 books... and keep a proper list
Several years ago I set myself the target of reading 50 books in a year, and somehow, through a combination of not being able to knit while feeding a baby and being up in the night a lot, I managed it. Since then I haven't read anything like as much. Two children seem to keep me pretty busy, but they're getting bigger, and I am starting to find more time to read again, so 26 books seems like a  realistic target. I've also added the Goodreads app to my iPad, so hopefully I might have more success recording what I'm reading than I have in recent years. I'm on target with this one so far - at the time of writing I have finished reading three books, which is actually ahead of target!

Read more books

2. Keep a record of everything I knit
...or crochet, and any yarn coming in and out of the house. In theory this should be pretty easy. My personal projects are generally up to date on Ravelry, it's the commissions and third party publication projects that fall through the gaps - I have to keep a lot of them out of them private for several months before I'm allowed to share them. A friend gave me a special project notebook for Christmas, so I think I have a fighting chance of keeping up this year.

Project one of the year

3. Don't buy any yarn for personal projects
There is a pretty constant flow of yarn into and out of our house. It's pretty inevitable when my job involves a lot of knitting. But I do also have a huge personal stash, and really have no need to buy any more yarn this year. Obviously I will still have to acquire yarn for many of the patterns I publish (my stash is bad, but I don't generally have a blanket's worth of yarn in one particular brand and weight of yarn, and magazines usually want new patterns in something very specific). I am hoping that by doing this I might be able to reclaim a few of the cupboards in our house for things other than yarn!

4. Only work on personal projects at weekends
I am guilty of spending far too much time working, and not enough time playing with other crafts and non-work knitting. I think these things are important to avoid burn out, and to learn how other people do things. The other thing I'm guilty of it knitting vanilla socks when I should be working on work knitting. So non-work knitting is now consigned to weekends, which should hopefully mean I work more efficiently during the week and get a few more personal projects finished.

5. Make blankets for each of my children
Both my kids are getting to the stage where their baby blankets are a little on the small side, so the time has come to knit each of them their very own special blanket. My daughter's is already planned, I just need to write the pattern and get knitting. My son's might be a little trickier, but I suspect will end up featuring something along the lines of Star Wars characters.

This was one of my daughter's baby blankets, but it's far too small now!*

6. Design and knit an adult-sized garment
You might remember that this was one of my aims for last year, and that while I shared several pictures of a part-knitted Pavement Sweater, I never shared any pictures of the finished garment. Well I did finish it, and I wore it to Yarndale. But since then it has been shoved in a box. It turns out there are too many things I didn't like about it (it's too long, the neckline is too wide, I don't like the looseness of the fabric, and sleeve increases combined with the fit create a weirdly large amount of excess fabric under the arms), so I think I'm going to unravel it and do something else with the yarn. Instead I am going to use some other (heavier) yarn and design and knit myself a jumper. It's going to take a bit of experimentation and quite a lot of learning, but I'm pretty sure I can do it. And if  don't try, I'll never know!

Create a more successful jumper

Do you have any New Year's Resolutions? How are they looking at the end of January?

*Pattern is Fluffy White Clouds.