I hope you had relaxing and happy holidays, whichever way you spend them. I spend one week in the Netherlands at my parents place, and am now following this up with another week off back in Paris. I never make a big deal out of New Years eve to be honest, nor am I big on resolutions. Some big life events happened for me in 2018, such as defending my PhD, getting married, and moving abroad. I’d be pretty content with a less eventful 2019!

I had no fixed knitting goals for 2018, other than wanting to knit more sweaters. As you may know I’m pretty addicted to sock knitting, and normally most of my FOs of the year will be socks. Wanting to knit more garments I knew would result in 2 things; less finished socks and less finished overall objects (a sweater takes me much longer to knit than a pair of socks).

Both of these predictions seem to be true. As you can see from my pile, I managed a total of 6 garments (2 tops, 1 cardigan, and 3 sweaters), which I’m super pleased with! I’ve been wearing them very proudly (whenever the weather allowed it). The bottom most orange sweater hasn’t been blogged about at all yet, as I cast it on last month on my Birthday and finished it on NYE. I’ll reveal its identity later this week!

The garments I knit are: Tegna top, Tambourine cardigan, Gran sweater, Threipmuir sweater, and the Bolan T. I’ve been wearing all of them but I think my absolute favourite has been the Threipmuir sweater. It was my first ever colourwork sweater and even though it is not perfect, it is perfect to me. I wear it whenever I can!

I finished 2 shawls, both at the beginning of the year, and already got so much wear out of both of them. I’ve been wearing the Henslowe shawl on warmer days and the Invincible Summer shawl on cooler days. To be honest they’ve kind of dominated my shawl choices, making me feel bad for my other shawls.

I finished two hats, one gifted (the Frais hat), and one pictures on the pile (Coral Reef hat). Both had similar rainbow style pompoms, making them incredibly cheerful.

Even though I knit much fewer socks than I normally would, 6 finished pairs is still pretty decent. This has also brought up the total count of pairs of socks I own to 41. This number has made me itch to get to 50 pairs in 2019, even though I realise it is a totally arbitrary goal. I knit 3 pairs of vanilla socks, and 3 patterned ones (Fade X socks, Tulsi socks, and Prairie Spring socks). I do by now feel like I’m slowly getting over knitting vanilla socks to be honest. The knitting is too boring and I’d prefer even having a simple stitch pattern to knitting a vanilla sock.

Once again I have no strong goals for 2019. I guess I want to continue knitting more garments, as its been such a rewarding thing for me in 2018. More colourwork would definitely be good to improve my skills there. Other than that, I’ll be knitting whatever strikes my fancy.

What about you? Do you have any (knitting) resolutions for 2019?

For the last couple of months I’ve had one of the most fabulous pompoms in my possession. I had already used a pompom just like it when knitting a gift hat earlier this year, but had been waiting for the perfect yarn before knitting myself an equally pretty hat. Just last week I got such an adorable and squishy and pretty skein of yarn in the post and immediately knew that it had to be paired with this pompom. And just like that, in a matter of days, I have a very pretty new hat!

Pattern: Coral Reef hat by Asita Krebs
Yarn: Stranded Dyeworks Merino DK in the Nougat colourway

I hope everyone is enjoying some lovely holidays 🙂

Let’s start with the happy news, shall we? I finished the Teddy Sweater in no time and it’s soooo adorable! It was such a lovely thing to knit, partly because of the pattern (well written, easy to follow, enough variation to keep things interesting) and partly because of the yarn (Malabrigo Arroyo is so lovely, I’ll definitely be using it again). I don’t even think I have much more to say about this FO, because I think these picture do pretty much all the talking. Cute, soft, fast, perfect.

Now let’s look at the opposite of this, the Safran cardigan I’m working on. It’s a teeny tiny baby cardigan but it’s already 1 month past cast-on now. I do have a lot of love for the project, but the colourwork was fidgety, the tiny sleeves with colourwork were fidgety squared. And in the end I was avoiding the project because I was avoiding my first ever steek, with good reason apparently.

See, when making decisions for this project I wanted to do it all, cute pattern, wearable cardigan, soft yarn, machine washable yarn, and because it was such a small project I wanted to try a new technique. Of course all of this is feasible but the most deadly mistake I made here; using superwash yarn, which I chose for many of the above reason.

When securing the stitches for the steek with a crochet method I was so relieved at how easy it was. When cutting the steek I was so relieved how easy it was. When noticing the first stitches slipping out of their secured position, well.. let’s just say the neighbours heard a lot of swearing that evening.

I steeked, I failed. The yarn is too slippery and simply will not hold. The stupid thing is I KNEW not to use slippery yarn, I did actually do my homework. But along the way factoring everything in I forgot I guess.

The good news? First of all the colourwork looks pretty neat on the inside doesn’t it? The fabric is actually really lovely after washing. Also, I think this might be salveagable. The current plan is to carefully bring the cardigan to my grandmother and have her machine sew over the edges a couple of gazzilion times. It won’t look nearly as neat finished as the pretty yellow crochet version I was going for, but I think it might actually hold (fingers crossed). As I’m leaving for the States tomorrow morning though it’ll have to wait until I’m back from my trip. I stored it away safely, so as long as the elves don’t stop by at night and start pulling it it should be fine.

And I guess if it won’t hold and it truly and completely fails, I will have learned a very valuable lesson about steeking.