Fiber Goals 2023: How did I do?

[terriko]

This is crossposted from Curiousity.ca, my personal maker blog. If you want to link to this post, please use the original link since the formatting there is usually better.

It’s December so it’s time to revisit my 2023 fiber goals and see how I did! You can see part 1 in my mid-year checkin post.

Toys

My kid has become really interested in Among Us so I made him a thing!

Amigurumi crewmate from the game “Among Us”

Games have really helped him practice a lot of emotional maturity things like, “you’re going to be bad at things for a while before you’re good at them” and “it’s not the end of the world if things don’t go your way” and “you shouldn’t break things just because you’re mad.” But he’s still in kindergarten and isn’t really emotionally ready for a game of lying to your friends with real humans involved, so he isn’t allowed to play the game himself yet. He *is* allowed to watch some videos of other people playing and imagine his own mods and stories. The toy inspired some pretty funny scenarios at play time.

I’m also working on the winter mystery gnome, which is going well so far:

A snow-gnome from the pattern Snow Matters What. He’s got a red hat, carrot nose, big green scarf, red stick arms, and embroidered snowflakes on his bottom snow ball.

I also sewed a creature that he named “foxy dog” from a great “Teacup puppy” pattern I got on etsy:

A sewn stuffed animal shaped like a puppy with big pointy ears and fox-like colouration.

And I’ve got another puppy in colours he chose (they’re very strange) that hasn’t been fully sewn yet.

Add those to the many other things I made this year, and I think this was a highly successful goal! There’s always more to make but I think a little focus on this went well.

Hand-dyed, hand-spun yarn

I made my big cabled shawl with one of the skeins my kid dyed last year. He provided the lighter green variegated colour and I paired it with a blue/green gradient set from Sweet Georgia:

Finished and blocked Ishneich shawl. It features a large celtic-style cable, lace border, and striped body.

I also did some sampling/swatching for my handspun, but nothing big yet.

A swatch of rainbow handspun yarn sits next to a tablet playing My Singing Monsters.

I’d say that this goal was met, because I definitely used yarn, but I do think I could do a lot more! The good news is that I’m taking part in a 100 day spinning challenge that counts *using* your handspun as well as spinnning it, so I’ve got plans for the next few months.

Complicated Cables

I did the aforementioned big cabled shawl! This is the Ishneich pattern by Lucy Hague that I wanted to do most:

Terri wearing the cabled Isneich shawl.

It turns out that I didn’t love cabling on the reverse side. I got sick multiple times while I was making it, so I wasn’t really at my cognitive best, and I screwed up the direction and had to fix it more than once. I won’t say I’d never do it again because I loved the resulting cable, but I didn’t want to try another two-sided pattern this year while we’re slowly experiencing every kindergarten disease in the area. So my last cabling experiment was socks — no wrong side to cause confusion! This is the Thriambus socks pattern (free in Knitty) that I made for my mom and I love them:

Thriaumbus socks on feet, shown in greyscale as it was posted when I was keeping the colour a surprise for my mom.

Thriambus socks. These have been freshly blocked and are handknit out of self-striping yarn in blue/green/white and a variegated purple. The pattern features and asymmetric set of cables on each foot.

This goal was absolutely met *and* I’m happy to have learned that I love cabled socks, so I’ll definitely be doing more of those in the future. Especially since I apparently have a lot of self-striping yarn in my stash and some of it will also play nicely with cables!

Patterns I Own

Honestly, I didn’t keep track of this one as much in the second half of the year. But I finished the golden poppy sweater:

Terri wearing her Golden Poppy Sweater and holding a to-go cup of coffee. The sweater features a large mosaic panel meant to look like California poppies.

And the Bubbles of Joy shawl:

Bubbles of joy shawl: a shawl with many bubble-like motifs in lace and colourwork. It features a large stripe of different coloured “bubbles” in a set of yellow/pink/red colours.

And the summer embroidery sampler from kiriki press (shown before I found smaller frames):

A small “summer” themed embroidery sampler with strawberry vines and a 3d sunflower.

I also did two more socks from patterns I own (both Shannon Squire patterns), and two from patterns that were free. The Thriambus one above and Comfy Soled Socks to try knitting non-wool socks:

A pair of handknit socks from the pattern “comfy soled socks” are in progress on my lap as I sit by a water play area at a park.

Plus technically I bought Ishneich before the end of 2022.

Hatch doggy using the Ishneich shawl as a blanket.

So this one continues to be met, and I feel like I had a nice balance with some new MKALs thrown in to the mix too.

The “other” goals

Every year, I also list some ideas that didn’t make it to my chosen top 4. Usually the way I do this is that I open up a draft post for ideas shortly after I do my mid-year checkin post, and I note things down there for the next few months before settling on 4 that I’d like to focus on. But that doesn’t mean the others are bad ideas, and sometimes I manage to do those as well. So here’s a few that actually happened:

• Sweater stash: I did indeed knit the Golden Poppy Sweater, and my kid has adopted one of the collections of minis for his own rainbow sweater (which is swatched and probably will start getting knit in January.)





• Embroidery: I didn’t do a year-long event but I made it through a number of kits!





• Quilting: I did indeed finish my adventureland quilt just as 2022 ended *and* a pretty rainbow one from several charm packs that turned out just as I’d hoped. I’ve started on another one for my kid that glows in the dark but it’s a few months out from finishing still:

Glow quilt in-progress shot. This quilt features halloween inspired fabrics assembled in zig zag stripes with a white glow-in-the-dark fabric featured as every other stripe.

Adventureland quilt on a couch.

A quilt made up of a rainbow of various patterned squares laid out in a diagonal gradient. The corner of the quilt is turned to show the moon/star pattern on the back (which glows in the dark).

• Knitty patterns: I did one as mentioned above, and queued a few more. I also experimented with knitty+ a bit and figured out how best to get my knitty patterns into Knit Companion using a print-to-pdf option.





• Weaving: I took that weaving class and have been having fun with my loom! I like it enough that I’m debating getting the “quartet” attachment one day, but I’m telling myself I need to spend time experimenting with what I’ve got before I start spending $$$ on upgrades. I’ve managed to read a weaving pattern now but I’d still got techniques to learn and practicing to do.

A weaving in progress on the loom, featuring stripes of “passionate fruit” from knitted wit and some textured white inherited from a friend’s mom’s stash.

A pair of handwoven towels featuring a set of stripes along two sides of the rectangular piece.

A handknit striped sock sits on a handwoven rainbow scarf.

• Spinning: I did manage to spin more overall this year, including keeping on after Tour de Fleece until I got sick. That’s important because it means I didn’t accidentally hurt my hands, need a break, and lose momentum!





• e-spinning: I did indeed push myself to use the Electric Eel Wheel nano 2 more, including using it for most of Tour de Fleece. And it’s been great! I was surprised at how nice it was to focus on my drafting skills and to be able to pick it up and spin in different places around the house.

A wound hank of handspun yarn in blue/green/grey. It is surrounded by cute stickers and other small items from my kid’s countdown calendar.

Summary

I hit all 4 goals, and also did a whole lot of other almost-goals from the brainstorming slush pile. That’s a pretty good fiber year! Stay tuned on January 1 for 2024’s fiber goals.