2016 in Review

Happy New Year! It went by so fast. Luckily I kept my goals simple in 2016. I had 3 goals - to teach, to spin, and to always be working on a project. I did teach, both at events and one to one. I didn't do much spinning, though. Work had me on the road often, which doesn't leave much time for spinning. Still, I enjoyed it whenever I could put a spindle in my hand. Unfortunately, I didn't even manage to try spinning with any new fibers. Maybe next year.

As for projects, I had several. I continue to play with lacis. I did quite a bit of knitting for Christmas gifts - mostly socks, and a pair of warm mittens for my sister who has moved to Wisconsin. Silly me, I didn't take any pictures. I've continued working on the Swedish sock pattern. More on that in my next post. And, I had a special knitting project in 2016 - I knit the sky. Here it is:

The idea was to look at the sky each day and knit a stripe using the colors you observe. I knit the colors I saw as I walked to work each morning, or when I first looked outside if I was not working. Most of the days are the Albany sky, but if I was somewhere else, that's what I knit. I expected to have beautiful blue stripes for the days when we went to LA, but it rained and was cloudy. One garter stitch rib didn't seem like enough back when I was starting, so I did 2 (4 rows of knitting each day). In this photo the end of the year is sitting on top of the beginning of the year. Any day that was clear or cloudy was knit in garter stitch. If it was raining, I knit a simple lace pattern; if it snowed, I knit "snowballs." The pink and peach colors are days when I saw a beautiful sunrise. That only occured at the beginning and end of the year. And a bit in October, before the time changed.

Here is what I learned from this project:

• two rows per day would have been plenty - the scarf is over 14 feet long! (If you can see the pink stitch marker, that marks the start of December.)
• I knit with 2 strands of yarn at a time, but there are many more than 2 colors in the sky at any time - sometimes I counted as many as 6. It was often difficult to choose which colors to use. I should have had at least 2 more colors - a very pale blue, and a lighter grey. The winter sky tends to be pale.
• There was not much snow in 2016. Even though I knit snowballs, none of the times it snowed was more than a dusting, except one storm in April that was about 4 inches.
• There was also not much rain. There are many long stretches with no rain at all.
• The sky is an amazing thing, once you stop to really look at it. While my project is done, I still find myself looking up.