A lovely year of finishes – April goal setting

Now that the days are getting shorter I'm beginning to realise that I'm going to have to be so much more organised about getting my posts up on a regular basis! There are no lovely daylight hours when I get home in which to take photos for posts, nor in the morning (since, for those who know me, I'm so NOT a morning person!).

The colder days also have me thinking it might be time to bring out the needles. I need a break from sitting at the sewing machine, and the thought of snuggling under a quilt to do some knitting is suddenly becoming very appealing. I can imagine you folks in the northern hemisphere have had enough of that right now and you're ready to throw off your layers and dance in the sun, but for us down south, it's quite the opposite.

With thoughts turning to knitting, I've also realised that most of the blogs I've been following since starting here are about patchwork and quilting, and that I really needed to rectify that by adding some woolly reading to the list. Here are a few I've started following on Bloglovin this week – click on the blog names to go directly to the sites for a peek.

Mason-Dixon knitting

This blog makes me smile. It's basically a conversation between two knitting friends. Kay in Manhattan and Ann in Nashville. Ann's posts during March on the experience of knitting the jumper pictured above had me chuckling one minute and then horrified (at the spit-splicing and steek-cutting) the next... I seriously don't think I could ever embark on such a project. The finished piece is just beautiful though.

My Sister's Knitter

I have to confess I've never knitted a pair of socks, but after checking out all the socks here I went out and bought some sock wool. Andi's blog has an impressive sock line-up. The picture above is just half the pairs she knitted last year alone. I also like the incorporation of little movie clips on this blog. I had a trip down memory lane with Sesame Street clip to celebrate her blog's third birthday.

Yarn Harlot

Stephanie's blog is almost like a meditation on knitting – pondering the amount of detail required in a pattern, the similarities between following a recipe and a knitting pattern, and how green wool always gets tangled in electrical appliances. Of course it also features lots of lovely works in progress including both spinning and knitting.

I like that knitting bloggers also talk about the woes and the heartache of knitting. Dropped stitches, wonky shaping, disappointing wool, badly written patterns,
sections that have to be undone and re-knitted... Which finally brings me to my finishing goal for April. Another project that has been hanging around for way too long.

I thought I'd finish it last year and was just doing the underside of the sleeves when I decided the colour was too dark. I was knitting it in black because that was all I had left, but it just looked wrong. Being so close to the end of the season, it just got put back in its bag and left there.

So, a year on and here I am again. Now it's out there as my April goal though, the pressure is really on to finish it this time!