New Year Intentions

Are you setting goals today?

It’s about to be the New Year and I’m sure many of us are setting goals and intentions for 2024. Being a Scot, all be it an ex-pat, I will be out of action from New Year’s Eve until Wednesday. I always award myself the extra Bank holiday that Scots folk get or I feel cheated! So today I’m working on my goals and intentions for the coming year.

Permission

With that in mind, I bring you  the gentlest of reminders that knitting is your beloved solace, your refuge, your self soother in times of trouble.

It is not an obligation.

There is no need to set yourself knitting goals, deadlines or anything but the most playful of challenges. This is not the moment to give yourself a hard time about the size of your stash, chaos of your pattern collection or the number of your works in progress.

We are about to face what some Spanish folk call “the hill of  January”. Now is the moment to coorie in with your knitting and luxuriate in the extra warmth that brings you. Soon enough springtime will arrive and bring with it fresh thoughts and an itch to clean, tend and reorganise. Then you can think about all that but for now let’s just enjoy the darkest time of the year and be grateful that our craft is so well suited to be such a comfort.

Enjoy it

If you must set yourself a goal then let it be to really enjoy your time crafting, make time for it in your day and to be open to serendipity.

The Power of Serendipity

Mostly this month I’m enjoying working on my Dreyma sweater. I never intended to make myself an Aran colour work yoked sweater this year. It came about by finding a stray 200 gram ball of a dark, tweedy, blue Wendy Pure British Wool Aran in my stash one day in December. I was wondering aloud to a knitting friend what to do with it and she  invited me to ‘shop her stash’. It just so happened that she had some New Lanark Donegal Silk Tweed Aran in a very complimentary tweedy light grey and so a bargain was struck and the sweater plan was formulated.  I’ve been working almost exclusively on it ever since as it has been such a joy to knit. I am on the sleeves and it should be finished early January, just in time for the coldest part of the year here on the Isle of Wight.