Resolutions Check-In: January

It’s a few days past the end of the month, but weekends tend to get away from me moreso than weekdays, so my first “2015 Resolutions” check-in post is a few days late.

I hope to do one of these at the end of each month this year to see if I can measure the progress I’m making toward my goals and resolutions that I posted at the start of the year. Hopefully it will help keep me accountable, if nothing else.

So. Let’s take a look.

Goal 1—yarn destash: 

To recap, my goal was to rid myself (through knitting and/or destash) of 24,000m of yarn by the end of 2015. To help me better measure this in small increments, I have a goal to be 2000m of yarn lighter by the end of each month. I’m definitely going to be moving, at least temporarily, sometime in May, so this goal just got to be extra important, since I don’t want to move all this yarn if I don’t have to. 

Progress: I did incredibly well on this, despite buying yarn because I had a birthday this month, and am actually close to a month ahead on my yardage numbers. This is mostly because I had a HUGE destash when I dropped off yarn at a shop for their charity knitting project, but I did also use up some metreage by knitting and through people purchasing some yarn from me as well.

851.3m of Berocco Ultra Alpaca went to my Tauriel cardiganby Bonne Marie Burns.

100.1m of Knit Picks Imagination Hand-Painted in Ruby Slippers went to the High Tea Jabot by Andrea Jurgrau for the Downton Abbey swap I’m participating in via the Subway Knits Podcast.

80.1m of Knit Picks Imagination Hand-Painted in Ruby Slippers went to the High Tea Cuffs by Andrea Jurgrau for the Downton Abbey swap I’m participating in via the Subway Knits Podcast.

That brings my total knitting for the month to 1031.5m of yarn. I won’t list all the yarns I destashed on my trip to Duluth, but suffice to say that it was 4288.39m of yarn (give or take some skeins I didn’t have accurate yardage for). Not bad!

I also destashed:

·         100.6m of Knit Picks Wool of the Andes in Dove Heather to my friend LAP who was visiting and needed knitting.

·         389.5m of Loops & Threads Dewdrops in Amethyst via Ravelry destash.

·         246.9m of Loops & Threads Kaleidoscope in Deep Night via Ravelry destash.

I did, however, also purchase yarn. Between my trip to Duluth and my birthday gift card for my LYS, I acquired 2156.16m of yarn. So my destash/knitting total was 6056.89m and my acquisition total was 2156.16m. This puts my total destash thus far in 2015 at 3900.73m.

Goal 2—Get my yarn dyeing business up and running

I did purchase a domain and an account from Squarespace and did some work to design a logo and tagline for the site, but I didn’t get much farther. I found an online course to help people get up and running with Squarespace and my goal for February (if I have the time . . . a lot of things pull at my attention in February) is to go through the Squarespace help documentation and also this online course and start figuring out what I need to do to get my site functional and designed the way I want it. I haven’t done much else beyond this, but it’s a year-long goal so as long as I can set myself small monthly goals and try to meet them, I feel pretty okay about it for now. This one is less measurable than the others on a month-by-month basis.

Goal 3—Blog more regularly

I think we can all agree that I’ve done a better job of this (for better or worse!). I’ve tried to make a goal to write a minimum of 3 posts per week, and with the exception of one week I definitely stuck to that schedule. I worry that because I’m a monogamous knitter that I don’t generate interesting content that regularly and so you all usually get a WIP post followed immediately by an FO post that basically say the same thing, but I’m trying. Hopefully I’ll be able to spend some time back in other crafts like sewing and dyeing and try to give you more tutorials on things like that or do some research into other potentially interesting topics I can post about that’s not just showing you the things I’m working on. Especially since eventually I’ll be working on a sweater or a larger project and there won’t be a WIP and FO post in the same week anymore. If any of you have thoughts on posts you’d like to see or topics you’d like me to cover, please do let me know and I’ll do whatever I’m able on the subject. I’m certainly not an expert at all things (or anything, really), but I do have a lot of thoughts on many subjects and I’m always happy to share them.

Goal 4—Sew more

I wouldn’t exactly say I met this goal, though I did make a project bag for an Etsy order and I helped my SO Jonas sew himself a vest. That doesn’t put much of a dent in my fabric stash and it definitely doesn’t help the winter themed dress I cut out ages ago that is probably now the wrong size get actually sewn together, but I guess it’s something. Sewing is a thing I really do love to do, but it unfortunately is the thing that usually gets pushed aside first because it requires such a different environment than just sitting in front of the telly with SO and knitting.

All in all, not bad. Many metres ahead on the destash, but I knew I wanted to get as much of a head start as I could, especially since I don’t think I can sustain the pace of knitting I put up in January as I get more and more busy with life and getting ready to move and then being a master’s student. Still, I’m happy. I need to put more time into building my website and make more time to sew, and then everything will be well and truly on track for a successful 2015. At least I’ve managed to make it through one month of this. Only eleven more to go! 

Here’s hoping all of you are as successful in meeting your goals as I’ve been.