2. Charity Hats

Because who can resist a picture of yarn?

This is what I see when I’m sitting at my desk. Which is actually somewhat rare – I’m usually in the living room watching the small people. My sweet husband said to me one day that I was doing really well using all of my yarn – because he thought it was all on the wall. Which is…. not exactly the case. 🙂 Anyway, a lot of what is up there is odds and ends – most of the whole skeins are in boxes or under the desk on a shelf. I’m going to try to use a significant portion of the acrylic this year – most of it was given to me, so I’m not super attached to it. It just keeps coming in.

My plan is to make hats and scarves and headbands to donate to a homeless shelter or some other charity. Not sure who they’ll go to yet, so if you have suggestions, please let me know! I don’t want to make the same pattern over and over because I get bored – and even the people at the shelter deserve a cute hat, right? I have a whole bunch of different patterns lined up in my Ravelry favorites to try out and decide which ones I like the most. I finished the first one today: it’s the Welted Beanie pattern by Theresa Calter. It was fast and simple, and what I like most about it is that it looks great both on me and on my husband! I think that makes it a good hat to donate – anyone could wear it.

1. Firebird Scarf

Because my goal is to keep track of completed projects, I feel it would be appropriate to start over at 1 in a new year. I’m wondering if that will make it difficult to differentiate between years… but the blog posts and photographs are dated, so that’s how I will figure it out.

We’re going to play catch up for just the last couple of months, since catching up for the entire last year would be nearly impossible. Which, coming full circle, is why I was supposed to be doing this – because I want to be able to remember what I make, how and why and wherefore.

My mom has always wanted to see the Northern Lights. Every few months, when the weather forecast says that the aurora should be visible further south than usual, she’ll grab whoever is available for a spur-of-the-moment road trip and head north. We drive until early in the morning and talk and have a great time, but we’ve never seen the lights. She’s decided to take a proactive approach this year, which means she’s going to be cold. I decided to be helpful and supportive by making her some mittens. 🙂

Since my primary goal was warmth, I wanted to choose fiber accordingly. I quickly came to the realization that sheep’s wool is far from being the warmest fiber available, and also that many of the warmest fibers – qiviut, angora, cashmere – are among the most expensive and rare. Go figure. I had a vision in my mind of what I wanted to make – colorwork mittens that looked like the northern lights, so they could either remind my mom of her trip or be the lights if she didn’t succeed in finding them. I found a pattern – always the hardest part – Candlesmoke by Barbara Gregory.

Browsing around Etsy for the perfect yarn, I found a fantastic shop – Penelope’s Fine Yarns – that carried beautiful repurposed yarn. All kinds of fancy beautiful fiber. I bought two colors of cashmere/silk yarn, black and dark grey, to hold together for the background of the mittens. And I finally found the perfect colors for the aurora swirls at another Etsy shop, BlackSheep DyeWorks, in a merino/silk blend. Such SOFT, beautiful yarn. Anyway, the mittens turned out beautifully just in time for Christmas:

Almost there…

Which brings us to what I was working on at the beginning of 2015: a scarf to go with the mittens. I had all the rest of that beautiful blue yarn and a pattern that I had tried last year but needed a yarn with a little more depth to it. The pattern is free from Ravelry and is called Oiseau de Feu (Firebird). It was a bit of a learning curve, since it was my first knit lace project, but once I got the hang of it, I really enjoyed it.

I bought some blocking wires and was very pleased with how easy they were to use and how effectively they worked. I’ve only blocked crocheted items in the past, one pin at a time – this was so fast and so easy. Naturally, I finished other projects while working on this, but…. chronology is not necessary for completion, right?

8. Wool Dryer Balls

Suddenly I find myself doing crazy things like making dryer balls. How did I get here?

I had wool yarn that a neighbor gave to me from when she helped clean out someone’s garage – so my total cost was pretty much nothing. I did wash the yarn before I wound it, because it smelled like garage and there was some stuff stuck in it. But I figure even with the extra work to wash the yarn, they

Here are the balls of yarn before they were felted. Don’t look too much different, really.

are free. Even if they turn out to not help at all I won’t be heartbroken. Took four skeins to make eight balls.

The felting was interesting, since I’ve never done it before; but luckily I wore a hole in my nylons on Sunday, so I had them to knot the balls in. It’s all working out well so far, don’t you think? Mondays are laundry day AND husband had the day off, so I did – let’s see – five loads of laundry? And the dryer balls got in on either three or four of those. Plenty to felt the yarn together. Wahoo!