Lots and lots of stitches – YOP 20/21 – Week 22

Hello everyone! Happy Sunday. Today’s the day I blog about my Year of Projects progress. YOP is a Ravelry group of bloggers who plan what they’ll work on for the year and then blog about it. You can find my running list, which I have been using more as a prioritization than a plan, here.

Wow, I just realized that this is the first YOP in four weeks where I don’t have a finished object to show off! I guess I got on a bit of a small projects and finishing kick over the past month! But not having anything finished doesn’t mean I haven’t gotten a lot of knitting done! In fact, in the past 7 days I’ve knit 31,000 stitches! Which is definitely a lot for me – 2000 a day is usually my goal. But the past 3 days of being off plus the fact that it’s darker earlier just meant that I’ve done a ton of knitting. I’ve put a few rows in on the body of the Druid Circle sweater, but most of my knitting has been on the Slipstravaganza Shawl.

When I picked this back up again this week, I was pretty early into section 3, and now I’ve finished that section and have 6 more rows to go on section 4! This is proving perfect knitting right now. It’s interesting enough to keep me engaged, but also simple and repetitive enough that I can read while working on it. The rows are over 450 stitches long at this point, which while that means it takes a while to see progress, there’s not a lot of fussing of flipping the shawl, changing colors, etc, so it’s pretty easy to just knit and knit and knit and read and read and read. I’m loving it right now. The next section (which I hope to start this afternoon) is short row triangles, so that should move kind of quickly, but then the shawl becomes 900 stitches long, and that I’m NOT looking forward to. It remains to be seen if I’ll be as enamored with this at that point. I’d really like to get this finished by the end of the year though, as I have some larger projects in the works that I’d like to get started on. One big project is enough for me!

I’m still trying out to figure out what I want to work on next. I really should start the shawl I’m planning to make for my friend’s wedding. I tried to do a gauge swatch for an allover lace shawl this week, and I kind of hated it. I was knitting with size 5 needles, which was annoying with lace weight, but the gauge was still too small for the pattern! I think I’m going to look for another pattern, one that’s mostly garter stitch with some lace at the bottom. I know my friend will appreciate a shawl, but she’s not a knitter so I don’t think she would fully understand and appreciate the extra effort that would go into the all over lace! If you know of something good, let me know.

One thing I do plan to work on in December is another pair of socks. I recently saw that A Girl and Her Wool was launching some new clubs. While the newer clubs didn’t necessarily interest me, I really liked the idea behind her regular clubs. I’ve been following Lauren’s blog for a while, so I figured now would be a good time to get a club! I really love how flexible these are. You can pick the amount of yarn you want, both in the regular color and a coordinating tonal if you want it! I got a three months subscription with 50 g of the main color and 10 g of the contrasting. This is perfect for shortie socks, so I think I’ll make a pair of those in December! I also got some 5g mini skeins to add to my blanket.

I hope everyone in the US had a nice long weekend. I really appreciated just being home and doing nothing. On Friday night, my cousins and I had a Zoom chat! That was super awesome, we’re scattered around the east and west coasts, so it was good to connect with them.