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.
Happy new year! I haven’t decided if I’m going to record my ink selections on my blog all year, since they’re already recorded in my journal itself, but I like seeing other people’s choices so here’s January’s inks!
Image Description: My January ink palette (the colours I’m using for writing in my journal this month) surrounded by the fiber and yarn from my spindle spin, which has a very similar set of colours. The fiber is a slow gradient of pink to purple to blue and back again and it’s visible in two braids, one of which is attached to a cross-arm spindle, and two “yarn turtles” (wound squarish balls of yarn made on the spindle). The ink colours are Diamine Lullaby (light pink/purple), Diamine Baltic Breeze (light blue with coppery shimmer), Diamine Nutmeg (grey with gold shimmer), Pilot Iroshizuku Yama-budo (dark fuschia), De Atrementis Cyan Blue Copper (bright blue with copper shimmer) and Diamine Cosmic Glow (medium blue with pink/fuchsia sheen).
I didn’t particularly intend for the ink and fiber to match, but I had them both sitting out on the table in my office and decided it was fun to photograph them together. The fiber colourway is listed as “omni pride” which I think is very similar to the bi pride flag. I like the richness of the colours and the gradient — I’d been planning to ply the singles together and get something with a bit of marling but I may chain ply instead because I’m so fond of the colour shifts I’m getting in the singles as they are.
Image Description: Short January book review notes written my January palette of inks with different fountain pens. I haven’t gotten around to writing out the text of these reviews yet but the important part here is to see the colours together showing the pink/purple/blue giving a slightly dreamy vibe because so many of the colours are very light. There’s also a cute “cat sleeping on a crescent moon” sticker visible at the edge of the photo where my journalling pages start.
The inks are a little less saturated and honestly the Lullaby is probably a bit too light for this pen/ink/paper combo so I may switch it out later. But I like the dreamy vibe and it goes well with my sleepy cat sticker sheet! Lullaby is weirdly fun colour to write with because of the way it dries on this paper so I’m enjoying it right now even if future me may have regrets when I try to read things.
You may notice that most of this is from the Diamine Inkvent Black box; this is because I honestly don’t own that much other ink. Most of my collection was half-empty sample vials before I bought the inkvent calendar. My goal is to use the inkvent inks heavily in 2025 and see how far I get before I decide if I’m doing another ink countdown at the end of 2025. I really enjoyed the whole process of swatching and using new inks every day for most of December, but I am very concerned that if I do this every year I’ll be over-run with more ink than I can use. So step 1 is using at least a few inkvent inks every month and we’ll see how it goes!
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.
This is my 10th year setting “fiber goals” as a fun way to direct my crafting for the year. I’ve come to feel like setting goals around creativity and joy and focusing on accomplishing things I want to do is important. Especially in contrast to a lot of traditional new year’s goals that are kind of guilt based.
I usually limit myself to 4 that I’m really commiting to for the year, so here they are for 2025!
Revisit old goals – I wanted to revisit some old goals in celebration of 10 years of fiber goals, but I couldn’t decide on which ones. So instead, I’m going to try rotating through them like I did with different crafts in 2024. Every month, I’m going to look at the goals and see if there’s one I want to revisit with one project. Since I know monthly isn’t the perfect cadence for crafts, but it *is* a good cadence for reflection, some of them may take several months, and some months I may not bother, but the goal is to at least look at the list monthly and make a choice.
Try Something New – to go with revisiting old goals, I’d also like to try some new things, but maybe smaller stuff spread out over the year rather than one big thing. As such, I think I’ll focus on techniques I haven’t tried rather than full new crafts: for knitting that might be entrelac, mitred squares, planned pooling, stacked stitches. For fountain pens it might be painting with fountain pen inks, new drawing techniques, mixing inks. Or maybe I’ll try making some things I haven’t made before, like felted slippers or a blanket. I think I’ll try to put something old/something new together in my monthly planning so I think about it regularly but I’m going to be flexible about having things take variable lengths of time.
Something stash something – I think I’m going to run a craft stash focused challenge thing mostly for myself but also invite folks on Mastodon to join me. I’m not sure what it’ll look like yet but planning is part of the goal!
Game design – I haven’t been a game designer in a long time (did you know I used to teach game design?) but I accidentally got my kid excited about one of my old ideas so I’m making this a goal in hopes we build something together, even if it’s not that particular game. This isn’t very fiber-y but maybe we’ll find a way to make that part of it?
Many years I’ve also included a bunch of brainstorming ideas here that didn’t make the cut, but I didn’t make a list of those this year.
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.
I already did a mid-year 2024 writeup so I’m just going to talk about the second half of the year here.
Gift yarn
I finished the lighthouse shawl:
Image Description: Terri, a mixed race woman, is standing near the edge of a parking lot outside. She has a Flo Mask around her neck over top of a hand knitted lace scarf, is wearing glasses, and is holding a black choir music folder.
And I started in on a pair of socks with a funny colourway called “Introverts Unite” that apparently I haven’t photographed yet. And I’m still working on the weaving.
So nothing spectacular in the second half of the year, but that’s expected because I wanted to do Finish or Frog Along and the fall gnome and then start in on Christmas socks for my Mom then the winter gnome. Maybe I should knit fewer gnomes? (That may be a problem as there’s going to be a lot of them next year.) The obvious solution would be to knit gnomes with gift yarn, but most of it is too variegated for that so no luck. If anyone wants to buy me yarn, apparently I need more 20g fingering weight minis in solid colours!
Overall, I think I got what I wanted out of this goal, but I do want to keep pushing to use more gift yarn in 2025 because there’s certainly some left that I’m really excited to use!
Lesser Used Crafts
The full year of crafts:
January: spindle spinning
Feburary: tatting
March: mending
April: weaving
May: Origami
June Pants
July: (supported) long draw spinning
August: Embroidery
September: Writing
October: Presentations
November: Sashiko
December: Countdowns
I missed out on some that I thought I’d do like felting, crochet and quilting. But I was really excited to do a lot more writing (honestly, now I kind of want to work on writing fiction, which I haven’t done in forever) and presentations (I had two accepted talks in the fall/winter). By December I decided adding another craft on top of swatching inks for inkvent and taking pictures of my various swatches and countdown calendars was too much, so I know “countdowns” isn’t a craft but there’s a combo of swatching and photography and writing a lot of alt text, and all of those are crafts of sorts.
I think rotating through crafts was very good for me, and I’m glad to have pulled out some stuff that I hadn’t thought about when I set the goal. But I don’t think monthly was the right cadence, and I was kind of less excited about it by the end of the year especially once I wanted to focus on Finish or Frog Along, so I don’t think I’ll be doing it again in this format.
I think this might work better as a quarterly thing or if I doubled up some months and only ran it in the first half of the year. But I’m expecting to have a busy 2025 and likely will wind up packing up a lot of craft stuff to move, so I’m thinking that I may try to pull out some unfinished crafts like my weaving, doing them, then packing up the supplies as I go. Probably won’t formalize it so I can play it by ear instead.
Pants
I finished the pants back during the craft rotation in June! I’d still like to revisit and work on drafting a better pattern for my preferences/body, but this isn’t a priority for me.
Colour Play
The biggest new addition here was that I bought an “invent” countdown calendar full of ink and swatched something Dec 1-25. It was a lot of fun, and I particularly liked the “painting with fountain pen inks” which I honestly hadn’t done much before but seriously, the inks are very fun with the multi-shading and the shimmer and sheen (less so the scented ones, but thankfully I didn’t have an adverse reaction to the scent they were just less-nice as inks because they were so wet).
I tried a few things over the year: dyeing, different spinnning colour techniques, pulling out some rainbow shawls and colourwork, learning what fountain pen inks I loved, and just knitting different types of yarn. It was very fun, but I will admit that this is probably all stuff I’d have done even if I hadn’t set the goal. I like colour!
The “other” goals
I often have a list of goals that I brainstormed but didn’t decide to do. But sometimes they happen anyhow!
Blogging – I got obsessed with fountain pens and then started writing more blog posts. Now I kind of want to write some fiction too…
Ditching Instagram/Meta – this did happen, and it’s improved my life a lot to only occasionally post for a contest or something and pop in maybe once a month or so. Not constantly getting bombarded by ads has been good for my wallet, and not getting nausea from auto-playing videos is great. I’m also slowly removing old fb posts on the rare time that I log in, though it takes forever.
Classes – I did take a dye class at Craft Emporium and it was fantastic! I’d like to spend some time experimenting with the techniques we learned but I haven’t decided what to make yet.
In conclusion
I accomplished all of 2024’s Fiber goals and had a good time and learned more about what I want to do next. Stay tuned for 2025’s goals on January 1st!
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.
This year is the 10th year I’ll be doing fiber goals, and I wanted to revisit some previous year’s goals, so I’m starting by making myself a mega post with all of them to contemplate. Fiber goals are meant to be fun things that bring me joy, and organizing them like this helps me prioritize some fun things in my life. So many new years resolutions are kind of chores or guilt-based, and I’d like to avoid that!
It’s kind of interesting to see the progression of what I’ve learned and where I put my focus over the years. Most of these goals were successful. There’s a few that I don’t need to revisit: the pants and that quilt are done and I’m not doing them again! But a lot of these could be revisited with new projects — I definitely have more gift yarn and brioche patterns and a few more “famous” patterns in my queue, plus I’ve got lots of beautiful stash that I want to use.
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 occasionally useful to know how long a knitting project will take me: When do I need to start a gift for it to be ready in time? How much yarn should I bring on a trip? So I decided to make a personal estimate I could refer to when I wanted to make a guess.
The thing I knit with the most consistent size is socks. I’ve made enough that I know how long it takes in an “average” week while I’m working and doing stuff: it’s about 1 week per sock.
Two socks are usually around 60g of sock weight yarn. Sock weight yarn can vary in yardage by weight, but it’s usually around 400 yards per 100g.
So a bit of math gives me 30g or 120 yards of yarn knit per week.
Estimating a month as 4 weeks, that means I can use a bit more than one skein of sock yarn per month. I use the same weight of yarn for shawls, and sure enough, a one skein shawl will also take me around 1 month.
Caption: A rainbow knit shawl in progress and a bowl of dried strawberries.
It’s mildly surprising that those estimates match since I usually knit shawls with around a US5 needle and socks on a US1, but I often do more complicated patterns on the shawls and make more mistakes, so maybe that’s why it’s not much faster? If I were trying to be highly accurate, there’s a lot of variables that could factor in to how fast I can knit a thing:
What size of needle am I using?
What weight of yarn am I knitting?
How complicated is the pattern?
How much time do I have to knit?
How distracting am I during that knitting time?
How often do I need breaks? (Due to being bored or avoid muscle strain.)
Am I working on any other projects in the same time frame?
But I’m not looking for high accuracy so this is good enough! I often knit a bit more on vacation (especially if I’ll be on a plane or a train) so I usually pack more than 120 yards/week, but it’s nice to have a rule of thumb.
The annoying part of knowing this, though, is that I have to be honest with myself about how much yarn I can reasonably buy and use in a year: many yarn subscriptions are 1 skein/month, and since I don’t have space for more stash, that means it’s probably too much yarn for me! This has been really helpful for keeping me away from yarn subscriptions and sales (especially the big ones from knitpicks), and has gotten me thinking more carefully about using my stash.
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