A Year of Knitting: 2016

08 Jan 2017

Oh, goodness. 2016 was my first full year of knitting - I only learned to knit in 2015, and finished my first “real” projects that winter - but the obsession is strong. I’ve become one of those people who can’t stop thinking (or talking) about knitting. I dream about it. I fall asleep pondering projects and wake up itching to work on them. I spend hours trawling Ravelry and listening to knitting podcasts. I’ve roped my friends into the madness, too, and I run a regular knitting circle at my hackerspace.

2016 was a rough year for me, in terms of health and my personal life, and knitting was a godsend. I know many people turn to knitting for solace, and I can see why: it’s soothing, tactile, engaging, rhythmic. It makes time pass. And at the end of it you get something nice to squish.

Anyway. Let’s look at what I made.

Tallies

• 10 hats (holy cow!)
• 2.5 sweaters
• 8 cowls/scarves
• 2 shawls

Of the above projects, 9 were gifts; the rest were for me. I don’t intentionally set out to do “selfish knitting” versus “gift knitting”, but there you go.

Successes

Most of the knits I’m proud of ended up being gifts. I knit my boyfriend a Gengar hat; knit an alpaca/wool blend cowl for a friend; gifted two hats to other friends; and made my mother a shawl.

I’m most proud of my green cowl-neck sweater.

…and the rest

My first one-and-a-half sweaters were pretty bad. I frogged the first half-sweater (made out of Lettlopi yarn), and the second one is an awkward lump at the bottom of my dresser. I learned a lot while making them both, though; it’s not as though I regret it.

I tend to make my hats the wrong size. I skimp on length and also knit the brims too wide. I need to actually put more thought into my future hats! Similarly, I tend to knit my scarves too short. I finally rectified that with my latest scarf.

My gauge varies a lot, mostly depending on the severity of my hand pain. For a while I was knitting impossibly loosely - I couldn’t make anything resembling “fabric”, even with worsted-weight yarn on size 1 needles. I’ve finally stabilized, but there are still some basic technical aspects that I need to work on, like evening out my tension in my knits vs purls. And my tension on straight needles is still looser than I would like.

Onward to 2017

I’m going to try setting quarterly knitting goals. For Q1, I want to:

• Knit at least one project from stash per month (defined as “don’t purchase new yarn for it”, or use up at least 200g of already-owned yarn)
• Knit one sweater

I’ve already cast on for my sweater and have a hat with stash yarn on the needles, so…here’s hoping I make it happen.