Happy Sunday! Look at me, doing a Year of Projects two weeks in a row! Year of Projects is a Ravelry group of bloggers who share a plan for their projects for a year, and then blog weekly about it. You can see my plan here .

I’ve got a finished object to show off this week! This is the  Exploration Station by Stephen West. Well, that’s what I based it on. I called this project my Expanded Exploration, because I wanted to make it bigger to use up more of the yarn I had. This yarn was orginally selected for the WestKnits 2023 MKAL, but I restarted and switched colors. So I had a full skein of each color and wanted to use more of them up. So, I added two additional wedges and then had to expand almost every other section to make stich ounts work out. As you can see, it really is HUGE and I’m so glad I added to it. I wish I had planned a little better, because I would have re-ordered the colors slightly so the teal was a bit more featured, but it still looks really cool. I also think the final A (navy) section could be a little longer to balance it out more, but at this point I was already at 620 stitches and it felt like it was big enough!

The yarns here are two colors of Farmer’s Daughter Fibers Bear Paw sock, the navy and dark teal were 2022 sock squad colorways. The light blue is Loop Sprig, and the light green is a random colorway from an Etsy shop. I started this December 8, and it was my primary knitting project in that time. Like with all the Stephen West patterns I’ve knit, it’s pretty simple and meditative while having stunning results. I recommend this pattern!

This is the current state of the other projects I’m working on. Hoping to spend some time with my tulip cross stitch now, and the purple striped socks are coming together nicely. I’m considering frogging my Mesotherm socks – I can’t really take them places because of the pattern, and I should have chosen yarns with more contrast. I’ll leave them for now and we’ll see.

Other than that things are going well! I’ve now finished one “normal” week in Seattle, and I love it just as much as my first week. It’s starting to feel more like home, though I miss the people on the east coast. This week I saw a Kraken game, walked around the city, watched the NFL game at a bar, and enjoyed some chill time in my apartment. Hope you all have an awesome week!