I know the trend is to do some reflecting on the previous year and make goals or hopes or dreams for the coming year, but I have no desire to do a lot of that this year. Last year is done and gone, thank goodness. Yes, some good things happened, the best maybe being our move to a new city, but there was also an awful lot of not-so-good for me. I’m ready to move on, but without putting high expectations on it. I want to knit, I want to read and write and edit, I want to keep trying to be a better person, I want to spend time with friends and family, I want to take care of my husband and kids, and I want to enjoy my puppies. None of those are new things.

That’s not to say I don’t have specific goals; I do. I want to knit from my stash more this year and control my yarn spending. I want to grow my Etsy business. I want to do more craft shows. But again, those aren’t new things. I’ve been doing well at knitting from stash, mostly thanks to the broken foot that kept me housebound. My Etsy shop did well over the holidays so I want to keep that momentum going. Craft shows, well, I’ve been trying to figure those out for ages.

Does any of this make sense? I’m not really sure what I’m trying to say. I guess just that I don’t want to tie it all together to a date. I want these all to be ongoing aspirations. And I think I’m off to a good start! I’ve finished two projects this year. One is a WIP that carried over from last year, and it was knit from stash. This is the Coors Cowl made with CEY Chateau. Originally I was going to do five colors as the pattern specified, but then I discovered that the darker grey I’d chosen wasn’t the same yarn. And once I got two colors knit, I realized five would make it extremely wide. I had to pick a third color, and debated between the pink and the blue…before deciding to use the second skein of purple in my stash. This is for me, after all, and I’ll almost always choose purple. I adore the end result. It’s wide, long enough to wrap twice, and it’s so wonderfully soft and warm and squishy. 

My second FO of the new year is my Malabrigo Rasta Cowl. Remember, I just bought this yarn the other day, so it’s not like knitting from deep stash, but it pleases me to use a new yarn quickly rather than stick it in the stash and forget about it. It helps that this is one of the fastest patterns I’ve ever knit. I used the Marian cowl pattern and made no modifications. 

That one’s for me too. January is Selfish Knitting Month for most knitters I know! But now I’m ready to focus on other things. I’ve got a scarf commission I’m working on, plus a ton of ideas of things I want to make to sell. I can’t wait to get my boot off so I can get outside and take photos of my new inventory. Maybe the “fresh start” thing is affecting me more than I realized, but either way, I think good things are coming!