2008 Wrap-Up and 2009 Preview

Last year was the Year of the Monthly Mitten. My goal was to make a pair of mittens each month. And how did I do?

38 pairs of mittens, plus 4 'demo' models that don't quite make pairs. Can that be called 40 pairs? Probably not. Especially since 2 mittens are so demo they don't have thumbs. I may make matches for one of them sometime this year. The other will probably have a productive life in my collection of Things Not To Do (And The Colors Not To Do Them With) for classes.

2008 was also the year of the Puritan Reading Challenge. Mom and I both endured to the end. Mom is actually still enduring, closing in on the final pages of the last book.

I had fine intentions of calculating how many yards/miles of yarn I had knit up, or how many pounds. But my kitchen scale lives in the kitchen, and I was not faithful in weighing my finished projects. That's not going to happen. But despite acquisitions (most of them from helpful enabling friends), I think my stash is lighter than it was at the beginning of 2008. I certainly didn't order as much yarn as I did the previous year. (I think. Maybe I shouldn't think too hard.)

2009 promises to be an interesting year. The gentle nudges of a few friends have bumped me into Designer Status, despite my pleas that I am not a designer. Thanks to a well-connected friend and a Ravelry group, I am beginning to do some test knitting. And thanks to the same friend, I will be teaching a class or two not located at my LYS. Which is sort of scary, if you think about it, since I've only ever taught one knitting class even AT my LYS. The things I like to teach about are perhaps too strange for this area? Aren't there thousands of knitters dying to spend a year knitting a lace shawl on 000 needles with thread it takes a magnifying glass and good lighting to see?

Let me close by sharing a tip I learned (the hard way) this morning: When knitting socks with dpns of the sort with stiletto tips, one ought NOT scratch one's nose with a knuckle on one's index finger unless one's thumb is firmly placed on the uppermost tip of the free dpn in that hand.

Ouch.