terriko

This year’s goals were as follows:

1. Revisit Old Goals





2. Try Something New





3. Something Stash Something





4. Game Design

We’re a bit more than halfway through the year so let’s see where we’re at!

Revisit Old Goals

Started strong in January by finishing up a rainbow shawl that had been on the needles for quite some time:

I’d intended to release the pattern since I had an old goal about writing patterns but… honestly, I haven’t felt like it, and I focused my time on other stuff that was bringing me joy. But I have a bunch of pattern notes and a bit more time right now so I may publish what I have without bothering to polish it.

February I worked on an old Beanie Bag kit from Jimmy Beans Wool that spanned 3 months. It was… honestly kind of boring and the pattern had a bunch of mistakes/confusing bits, but I finished one month’s worth and will likely do the other two at some point.

March-April-May I finally got around to knitting Wingspan, which was on my “something famous” goal plan but I never made it. It was a pleasant knit once I got into the swing of things, but by the time I finished it was too warm to wear it here so I haven’t really gotten pictures! Here’s one from before it was blocked, though:

June I took a break from old goals (and focused on writing).

July I pulled out some gradient balls and made socks for my mom’s birthday (a bit early because the timing worked out), plus I did tour de fleece stuff.

Overall, A+ on revisiting old goals. I have a couple more “use kits from stash” ideas but I may otherwise declare this particular goal complete and focus on some other stuff.

Try Something New

January started strong with me working on a hexagon blanket, which I’m still working on between other projects.

February I tried assigned pooling and made the “Shard” shawl by Romi Hill. It was fun and I’ll likely do other assigned pooling patterns!

March-April-May I worked on Wingspan for the old goals and didn’t bother doing new stuff.

June again was a break from all knitting goals. (I was writing instead.)

July was mostly finishing up work/travel and I didn’t feel like learning something new.

There’s probably some more to be done here but… honestly, I’m not sure this goal is playing well with my burnout? I’ve got some tentative plans for learning some bookbinding in August if my kid is amenable so that might be up next. But I think I may just focus on finishing up the hex blanket rather than pushing myself to come up with new things to do if I’m not feeling it. So this goal may be as complete as it’s getting unless something fun occurs to me.

Stash Something Stash / Write more

I’d planned to run some kind of stash-focused event about appreciating what you have (as opposed to feeling guilty about what you have, a common vibe in a lot of “use your stash” events) and I got as far as coming up with a nice list of prompts and ideas. But then I realized that… I didn’t actually want to run it. I was burned out on social media and wanted to spend less time on my phone. So I’ve declared this goal as complete as it’s going to be. The prompts will keep if I decide I want to run things later.

That said, I replaced this goal that no longer fit with a goal of “Write more” instead since it was what was bringing me joy and it deserved some focus and time.

I’ve done a bit more writing for this blog but the biggest part of my writing this year has been fanfic since I’m having fun. I joined a discord to hang out with other writers in my current fandom of choice and I took part in a prompt challenge (which is why I didn’t knit as much in June-July so I could write). I’m now over the 40k “that’s a novel’s worth” of words since January and I’m pretty delighted with myself.

There’s something deeply satisfying in the current economic environment about making something that is basically non-monetizable put on a website run by a nonprofit (that I donated to!) and my output only serves to make strangers/new friends happy. And I definitely made a bunch of people happy! (Including my kid, who helped with some ideas in one of my stories.) Also I’m amused that my existing community of open source people and my new community of fan writers are somewhat similar and overlapping nerds. Not a surprise that people who share their creative outputs for free have some similarities but it’s still a delight.

I expect I’ll keep writing through the end of the year (and beyond but this post is about 2025 goals). I’ll probably join another challenge or two but even if I don’t do more than finish my current story in progress, I feel like this replacement goal has been met *and* it’s brought me a lot more joy than the original goal. And these goals have always been about finding time for things that bring me joy!

Game Design

It took waaaaay too long to get approval from work saying that my silly games weren’t going to conflict with my job at which point I was so frustrated with my boss for other reasons that I was intentionally trying to get put in the layoff pool (and I succeeded). But the end result is that I haven’t actually *done* any games stuff beyond a bit of helping my kid learn Scratch programming for his robot. I’m not replacing this goal because I still want to make games, but I haven’t figured out an actual plan yet so that’s on my list for part 2 of the year. So far I’ve got my personal laptop set up a bit better for game work (attached it to the kvm with my big screen and mouse) and I think I might aim to play around with some existing frameworks and make silly things with my kid as a goal for August.

More Thoughts

It turns out this year it hasn’t been *fiber* that was really keeping me happy. I mean, I still knit/spin/whatever but it’s writing and video games that have helped me cope with the burnout and grief (particularly from losing a friend earlier this year, but there’s grief tied up in climate and politics right now too). The fact that fiber wasn’t the perfect solution for this type of burnout makes sense because I needed something that engaged more of my brain and took me away from worrying about geopolitics/work/my deceased friend. I knit to focus my brain but when my brain is spiralling that’s not the right thing to do. I do knit-and-write-in-my-head a lot so it’s compatible with what works to distract me, at least, but fiber hasn’t been as much of a focus for a few months and I’m not sure if that’s going to change. I am wondering if I should stop calling these “fiber goals” next year so I can encompass some other hobbies, though.

With work as a stressor out of the way for now but more “international move” and “find a new job” stress coming, I’m intending to just roll with what works for these goals in the second half of the year. I *am* really enjoying using my fiber and stationary stashes now that I’m trying not to spend so much money — past me bought some lovely stuff and now I have time to use it. I think doing some game stuff is going to be fun when I sit down and start playing. And I’m really enjoying writing fanfic in a way that I haven’t in a long time, so I’m happy to keep leaning into that too. Last time I was involved in a fandom I presented as an artist, and writing is a different experience, and I’m loving it so much.

My 2024 fiber goals were as follows:

• gift yarn





• lesser used crafts





• pants





• colour play

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:

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:

1. January: spindle spinning





2. Feburary: tatting





3. March: mending





4. April: weaving





5. May: Origami





6. June Pants





7. July: (supported) long draw spinning





8. August: Embroidery





9. September: Writing





10. October: Presentations





11. November: Sashiko





12. 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!