And now we plan...

I hope your Christmas was restful and full of joy! The Incredibly-Patient-Mother and both Siblings joined the Philosopher and I at Chez Hedgehog.  We and the felines ate far too much food, watched movies, opened presents, and had pots and pots of tea.

I got a wonderful knitting related gift. The IPM bought me two packs of blocking mats! Each set covers a full 12 square feet of floor.  The giant shawls that I've knit and that Sibling-the-Elder has knit for me can finally be blocked in their glory. [Just as soon as I move everything out of the dining room]

The one knitting related gift I gave on Christmas day there is no picture of. I forgot to take photos of the red socks that I made for the Incredibly Patient Mother. They were from the Dallas yarn purchase of last January and weren't very well aged stash...

While I didn't do a whole lot of holiday knitting, now that the year is winding down and I'm considering the new year ahead, plans are leaping out of my brain. I need to block the green sweater and finally start wearing it, I'm still trying to finish up the ice blue socks before next week (don't worry, I'm almost to the toe of sock 2), I'm midway through a pair of fingerless gloves...

A high priority though will be to make myself some mittens. Yes I need new ones already. The fliptop mittens I'd so recently knit myself are gone. Last Thursday, somewhere between a taxi / a coffeeshop / and the theater, my flips disappeared. There was frantic searching after the performance when I realized they weren't in my purse and despite retracing my steps, they had disappeared. I hope someone found them together and is wearing them in good health.

I still have a fair chunk of STR Mediumweight left and I need to run it through my yard counter to see if I can repeat or if I need stripes or what the plan should be.

The Brunette's mitts still aren't done, the Brunette's husband's mitts are...um... yarn.  I've got some sock yarn wound up for the new year but need to sort things into project bags.  And I swear, this year is going to be the year that pink afghan gets finished. Per Ravelry, I've been working on it since May 2007. This year it is getting evicted from the bin it's been hiding in and turned into a functional, person-warming object. I also have pretty serious designs on the half dozen cones of bulky weight cotton still lurking around, so if anyone is interested in a hand knit washcloth, I should know about that sooner rather than later for the gift planning bin.

There's some yarn getting evicted from the stash. It's perfectly nice wool but it's just not anything I'm going to use, so I'll post a link to my Ravelry for-sale/trade when I get it sorted out the stuff that is leaving.

The Philosopher and I have started making general new year plans as well. A lot of them involve organizing and getting rid of excess things, going through things again and pruning the load, lightening up the apartment, being able to know whether or not we're actually out of something.  One particular plan involves scanning a LOT of papers and letting the hard copies go. The tax returns from when I was 15, for example, probably safe in PDF form especially considering I've barely had to keep anything the past three-five years, all of my w2s have been electronic, even most of my 1099s have come via email.  An external hard drive takes far less space and, while we're not planning to move anytime soon, we'd like to not have to move these things again in their current formats.

I just updated the KnitMeter and I'm very close to 11K, which is pretty satisfactory for a year full of many other things. Whether or not I can average 1000K a month this next year remains to be seen.  But there are many babies expected by friends due soon and a lot of really lovely wool floating around the stash that I'd like to get out and make things with...so we'll see what comes next.

What are your knitting plans for 2014?