2021 in knitting

I promised you some knitting content, and there was a lot of it last year. But before I get into it, I want to say thank you to all of you who commented on my last post. You really brightened my day. I missed you, too!

Now for the knitting… I use the challenge feature in Ravelry, so I can tell you that I hit my goal of completing 35 projects. I went back to look at them in prep for this post, and I noticed something that should not surprise me. I knit lots of small, portable projects. 15 hats, 5 pairs of socks, a baby sweater and baby booties, two gnomes and a mini tree, a cowl and 4 shawls. I knit two sweaters for me, and rounding out the year were 4 weaving projects, a scarf and three sets of dish towels. Yes, that adds up to 36, because I put the 2 gnomes together in one Ravelry project.

Throughout the year, I felt like I wasn’t knitting as much, or my usual things, but when I look back through other years, it actually lines up pretty well. I typically knit 6 pairs of socks, and a couple of sweaters. Normally I might knit more shawls and fewer hats, but it was pretty close.

So what were all these things? Well, top of the list is the never ending ocean currents finally finished and delivered. It came out lovely, if I do say so myself, but not sure it was worth the slog.

Although the smile behind that masks says it was!

The hats ran the gamut from simple beanies to the “Capitol” which required paying lots of attention And I joined the throngs who knit Musselburgh, which should count as two! (https://www.ravelry.com/projects/salpal1/musselburgh if you want to see the project on Ravelry for that.) But I think my favorite is this one, a made up pattern I knit for a coworker who let me pick through the yarn she inherited from her mom and take as much as I wanted.

I love experimenting with a traveling icord accent.

Shawls were not as prolific as I would have liked, but I enjoyed knitting them, including my handspun nightshift, which I finished in January 2021. I could not get a good selfie of that, but here is the best effort!

It is rather like a small blanket!

What I did not finish, and might explain the feeling I had that I wasn’t being productive, were my Gramercy Park sweater and the year long Japanese Sampler Scarf MKAL. Both of those required more brain cells than I could muster at the end of the year, so they got put down in September. I have since finished the scarf, and am working on the sweater, so am feeling better about them. And I decided not to join in the MKAL for this year’s scarf. Still not ready for pressured knitting.

That’s the highlights… if you want to see more of the various things, check out my Ravelry project page. (If you aren’t doing Ravelry, but want to see something, let me know, I can pm you project details)

https://www.ravelry.com/projects/salpal1?set=&page=&search=&sort=status%20completed_%20status_changed_&view=thumbnail

And if the settings won’t let you look, let me know. I think I have everything set to public, but the gray matter still struggles sometimes.

Where to start…

As you might have guessed from my disappearance here, we had quite a year. It’s a long story with which I won’t bore you completely. Suffice to say that Dad passed away December 18, 2021, after a long, hard battle. His family worked very hard to give him what he wanted, so he was at home for most of the year, bar two weeks last March when he had some strange complications.

Two of my siblings and I worked well as a team, the fourth offspring did his best, but wasn’t able to be as involved in Dad’s care as the rest of us. The stepmother was herself, and we worked around her. (Now that Dad is gone, I think she is realizing that having us in and out, paying all the bills, doing the grocery shopping, cleaning small areas, etc wasn’t the horrible torture she thought it was at the time. ) The pandemic made all of that a special torture, especially early on, when my brother N and I were alternating weeks staying at Dad’s…we were always quarantined somewhere because we “traveled” — if you can call driving as fast as possible for 6 hours, not stopping anywhere for anything, travel! We were so grateful when we were able to get vaccinated!

All that family stress was matched by stress at work, with changes in top management. I could not tell if that was really worse, or my capacity to deal with it was diminished. But either way, I left that place of employment of 25 years in February 2022. I am not sure if this is a hiatus or if I am semi-retired, but the amazing relief I felt immediately upon giving notice told me it was the absolute right decision. Can’t quite afford to be retired yet, so after a month off, I started doing some data entry for A. I can do it part time, the hours are totally flexible, and I work from home. It is perfect for me right now.

The year held a lot of knitting, I will share that with you soon. But in case you have wondered, I did, indeed finish ocean currents. Photos next time. Which hopefully will be in less than a year!