In my last post, I kind of mentioned how I hadn’t really been feeling motivated to write a fancy blog post on here with photos and links and stuff. And that’s still true. But today I was reading though a blog friend’s old posts (I do that sometimes, I hope it’s not creepy!!) and I was reminded that to get back into something, you just need to do it. Just write something, even if it’s not as good or pretty or fancy as you want it to be. So here it is, a random blog post of random thoughts.
I’ve been very monogamously working on one of two test knits I’ve been selected for (oops!). This is the Cempasúchil top by Magali McDonald, known as theknityorker on various social media sites. It’s a slightly vintage-y feeling textured tee, and so far I’ve made the sleeves and am almost done with the bottom ribbing. I haven’t done this sweater construction before. I made one bottom up sweater in like 2017 into 2018, but it was fully seamed. On this one you attach the sleeves and decrease, so I’m excited to try that out!
In other knitting news I’ve slightly revamped my st per day spreadsheet to focus more on meeting a yearly goal rather than a rolling 365 day goal. I actually realized that even though I’m currently over 1M stitches, I have to keep a pretty good clip if I want to end the year with 1M. I have to knit about 3K st per day right now, which is more than the 2.7 K per day goal I started the year with. It’s a little weird to see my rolling 365 day so high, but I had a very stitch filled November and December last year, so those days were boosting up my rolling 12 #s but as they fall off the rolling 12 count goes down. The hope is that by shifting the focus to a goal to meet a yearly stitch count, I can worry less about what happened last year and not feel like I need to keep up so much. I’m actually thinking about making next year’s stitch goal a little less, it’s been causing me some stress to have my daily goal be 3K right now. I know it’s silly to worry about stitch counts AT ALL, but I really like being able to see and track what I do. I think it’s due to what I do at work right now being more strategy based then project based, so it’s a lot harder for me to see progress, and so I focus on this because it’s a place where I can measure productivity. But then I think that measuring productivity for knitting is silly because it’s a hobby. But the fact that I’ve put hours into building a tool and have consistently done something (tracking my knitting) for almost 16 months in a row now brings me a lot of joy.
ANYWAY, that was a ramble. See what you get when I don’t try and make fancy pretty posts? I hope those of you in America had a good Thanksgiving with family and friends if that’s you’re thing. We had a nice little family gathering with way too much food as is our way.
Way too much food – but it all was delicious!
Glad to hear you had a good Thanksgiving celebration. Whilst we Brits have embraced the American traditions on Halloween (well, the others have – I still hate it with a vengeance and hide away), we haven’t taken to Thanksgiving at all.
What I wanted to say, though, was that it isn’t at all creepy to read old posts on blogs. I love seeing that people have been to my older posts and I quite often go back to a post on other people’s blogs. In a similar vein, I’m thinking of listening to some very old podcast episodes, particularly some of the knitting podcasts I remember from years ago, because most knitters now do video podcasts and I used to enjoy just listening as I knitted.
I 100% agree with the idea of tracking your stitch-count on a strict year basis rather than the rolling year. As you say, why subject yourself to all that stress – you need a regular reset or the goal just becomes a carrot dangling on a stick forever out of your reach.
track yarn in and yarn out and just updating the spreadsheet this week and for the first time my yarn out is more than yarn in and I got a right mental boost from that. If tracking your stitches gives you a mental boost then I’m all for it. We do what works for us.
First word was I…I was caught in the jetpack loop of it not letting me post so had to open up and paste it here. I have no idea why it does this on your blog for me and not on other WordPress ones. Its weird
Ugh so weird! I did purchase an extra jetpack search feature in preparation for selling my stitch tracking spreadsheets, so maybe that has something to do with it? But I haven’t heard of others having trouble so who knows.
Whoohoo that’s an accomplishment! Isn’t it fun to meet those self set goals?
Definitely.
I’m glad that you had a great thanksgiving with your family – the sweater looks very promising (k1,p1 ribbing always looks kinda elegant I think).
Good luck for setting your new stitch goal!! You will find a great way of setting it – AND keeping track! 🙂 Go you!
We also had a nice family gathering with way too much food. But it was good to see everyone! I’m glad you posted about your progress, even if it wasn’t a fancy post. (Blog posts don’t need to be fancy.)
Glad you had a good Thanksgiving! Ours was low-key and nice. Your new test knit tee sounds interesting. Can’t wait to see it done!