My Life in Stitches: Testing my Willpower

Photo by Anna H-G

This year I’m on a yarn fast. For non-knitters, that means I’m not buying any more yarn unless I need it to complete a project. It’s Feburary and I’ve only bought one skein of socks. But there are some yarns out there that are really testing my willpower.

•       Jimmy Beans Wool’s Micro-Brewed Series Chronicles of Narnia. This beauty is called Aslan for the majestic lion from the Chronicles of Nardia series. The yarn is drool worthy, especially for people who are seduced by gradients. The Ice Queen is great, too.
•      Verdant Gryphon Utopia in Bugga. This color way is too of my favorite colors combined. That, combined with the fact that it’s Bugga, makes me want to grab my credit card.
•       Miss Babs K2. I’m not a big chunky weight girl because knitting with big needles hurt my hands, but this would be worth it. I’ve been longing to knit Soho Purl’s Color Dipped scarf and this would be perfect. 

Hopefully I can stay the course with my yarn fast. Not easily with all this loveliness popping up on my FB timeline.

My Life in Stitches: New Year's Knitting Resolutions

In my last My Life in Stitches post, I gave an overview of my knitting projects. As I went through my Ravelry page to write that post, I had a couple of revelations. One, I make a LOT of scarves and not many garments. Two, I noticed that I consistently learned new techniques last year. That’s one of the things I love about knitting. There is always something new to learn.

New techniques make up the bulk of my New Years knitting resolutions. This year, I want to learn to:

• Continental Knitting. I know how to do a continental knit stitch, but continental purling baffles me. I want to do at least one whole project in continental. Maybe I’ll actually finish my Color Affliction…I mean Affection in continental.
• Knit Fair Isle. I’m thinking that this isn’t as hard as I think it will be.
• Intarsia knitting. This truly frightens me, but I’ll have to put on my big girl panties and do it.
• A new cast ons. I know cable, provisional, crocheted provisional, long tail, and knitted cast on. I’ve toyed with Alternate cast on, but I haven’t mastered it yet. I also tried a lace cast on, but I didn’t think I was doing it right. I want to learn a German and a tubular cast on and master the lace cast on.
• Master seaming. I normally run screaming from patterns that require seaming, but that disqualified so many nice sweaters.

As far as projects, I would like to:

• Make more garments. Once I get the hang of seaming, I should be able to add more sweaters to my queue.
• More socks. Socks are the perfect travel project, but I’ve only made a few pairs. Hope to change that this year.
• Design more patterns. I’ve designed a cowl (stay tuned for when it will be available on Ravelry), but I want to do more.

And what list of knitting resolutions would be complete without some vow about stash control. I would love to say that I want to keep my stash from growing, but I don't want to make promises I can't keep. Besides, who knows what lovely yarn I'll come across this year that wants to be mine. We'll see how that goes.

What are your knitting resolutions this year? Share below and we’ll keep each other accountable.