Positive thinking

Well dear blog, I've been trying to think positively about things, so let's go with this in response to the length of time between my last post and this one: at least I've got my 2017 New Year's Resolutions sorted.

Resolution 1: Get back to blogging regularly. 
I really enjoy having that record of what I've been up to and what I've thought about it. And if I do it then I can stop feeling guilty about not doing it.

Resolution 2: Read. Make time. 
One of the reasons I haven't been blogging is because I've been in a bit of a reading slump. However, my saving grace in all this is that in September I joined my local Waterstones book group, and have therefore managed to read a book a month, so I can blog about those if nothing else. So far we've read Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (excellent, beautiful, not exactly cheery), Beside Myself by Ann Morgan (pacy, complex, not exactly cheery), and Madness by Roald Dahl (short stories, wonderful, not exactly cheery). January's choice is The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, which I've wanted to read for ages, so I need to get on with that over the holidays, and we've chosen the one for February as well, which is sitting ready on the shelf upstairs but I can't for the life of me remember the title. I've also listened to a couple of the Number 1 Ladies Detective Agency books by Alexander McCall Smith on audio, which have been excellent - the narrator is absolutely fantastic. And I'm looking forward to Christmas, despite the fact that our plans seem to involve driving the length of the country four times in as many days, because we've chosen an audiobook to listen to on the way that we can both enjoy, so I'm going to get to read The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers, which I've resisted buying a hard copy of for a while, so well done me.

Resolution 3: Craft. Make time. Use what you already have.
I went on a bit of a knitting frenzy over the summer. We went on a very lovely holiday to Sweden (much-needed after some unexpected adulting) and found a very lovely yarn shop in Gothenburg, so I obviously had to buy yarn, with which I made a gorgeous Rain Outside shawl. Somehow I managed to go from casting on to wearing it in a month, and it's been a staple of my autumn / winter wardrobe (the beauty of the internet is that I can pretend that I have such a thing and you won't know any different!). I then cast on an equally beautiful Brickless shawl, which stalled slightly for various reasons, not least of which was that the gorgeous yarn (Malabrigo Rios) comes in skeins and the ball winder that my lovely boyfriend ordered for my birthday took 6 weeks to arrive!
In the meantime, I decided to test-knit a shawl for a designer after seeing a post about it on Instagram, which was a great adventure. It turns out having deadlines is great for my productivity. (It's the Farlam shawl by Clare Devine - knitsharelove - details on Ravelry.)
Then a friend's mum organised all of us to crochet a square for a blanket for her, which necessitated me learning how to crochet, and suddenly crochet became a thing in my life. The friend who taught me started me off with a square that I could keep adding to as a scrap blanket, so I rummaged through my stash and found a whole load of small scraps of yarn dating back about 10 years to when I first re-taught myself how to knit. It was great - the blanket kept getting bigger, I was enjoying the memories... but then the little scraps of yarn started to run out, and the colours were becoming less varied because I was running out of some of them, so I had to go rummaging a bit more, and find some of the balls of yarn that weren't really scrap, but were leftover from projects I'd finished or abandoned. And actually, I'm really enjoying using them all up - it seems much more productive than leaving them to languish in a cupboard. I started musing in spare moments about the different stalled projects I've got and whether I was really going to finish them. I thought about the sofa throw I've mentioned on this blog, and realised the fundamental difference between knitting and crochet: knitting is lovely, but you really have to commit to doing at least one full row at a time. You can't put it away mid-row without worrying you're going to lose stitches, which makes large projects a bit tiresome because they require you to sit for long periods of time to make any headway. But because crochet only works off a single stitch, you can stop whenever you like. So the sofa throw yarn has been recycled... it's still going to be a sofa throw / blanket, but it's now a big crochet square that I can keep adding to whenever I like, and it's growing pleasingly fast. I'm going to try and do that more this year - complete projects, or find a purpose for the yarn I already have.

That said, I have asked for the yarn for a new crochet project for Christmas - but it is for a Crochet-A-Long starting in January, so I hope that's going to be my motivation to complete it.

Resolution 4: Plan. Do. Repeat.
I don't think I'm ready to announce this one to the world yet, mostly because I don't have any fixed ideas about how to achieve it, and it's quite deeply tangled up in a lot of anxiety, but I'm putting it here because I know what it means, and maybe by writing it down I might encourage my brain to start coming up with a more concrete yet achievable sort of plan. Positive thinking you see.