2015: Year of Making plans and other year-end/beginning stuff
Happy 2015! Do you feel like now we’re officially in the future? I do. 2015. Damn. Anyway, I have some things to share with you and tell you about! I’ll start with the older news… In late December, the 4 days after Christmas, I released a free pattern via social media. (Here it is on ravelry.)
The bulky weight Insta-hat pattern was posted in 4 mystery parts, on instagram and tumblr (and linked from twitter and my ravelry group). It was like a quick mini-mystery-knit-a-long for after holiday knitting stress times, and I think everyone had a lot of fun! Yay!
There’s the finished hat – I made 4 samples because they were SO quick to make! And I topped one with a pom-pom; the extra-long sized version works well both long and slouchy, and with the brim folded under for extra ear warmth. This one was made with this recycled hand-dyed yarn I made many years ago.
If you want to make it now, just click the links given on my leethalknits webpage, or on the ravelry page. All pattern posts still exist for you to use for free!
And I have another free thing for you! The 2015 leethal knits calendar is available for free download on leethal.net! My new year gift to you :)
Last year’s post about my first calendar talks in more detail about the calendar in general. This year’s is all photos of knitting on the needles. And there’s a blank one that you can download to use with your own square-format photos.
Moving along… Do you know about Year of Making? I had sort of been aware of it, just from seeing instagram posts tagged #yearofmaking throughout 2014, but I didn’t know where it came from until I heard Kim Werker’s podcast interview with Miriam Felton, the creator of the concept.
Kim also released an ebook about Year of Making, which I bought and it’s great (like everything Kim makes!), so I recommend that for some making inspiration. Check out the table of contents page down below to get an idea of what’s in the ebook…
So, I decided to get on board for 2015, but loosely… I won’t be posting a photo of what I make every day on instagram, but I will try to put photos of each day’s making up in this flickr set. I’ll instagram the good stuff, and I’ll probably put up some tumblr posts of bigger projects here and there. I’ll just see where the year takes me!
Something I love about Kim’s experience with her first year of making is how she ended up getting really into making things she had never done before, like making soap, and painting. I don’t have plans to learn any big new kinds of making, but I do want to get more into sewing this year, and maybe more drawing, and more spinning, and I’ll just see if anything else calls out to me! (Above and below are pages from Kim’s ebook.)
As for my “rules” for myself, for what I’ll count as a #yearofmaking thing… like I said, I plan to be very loose, not strict at all, so missing days is fine – when I’ve done year-long project things like this in the past, I tend to get stressed out about it as the year goes on, and I don’t want this to cause any kind of extra stress in my life. I usually do some kind of making every day for my job, knitting on a design project, etc, so I mostly won’t count work-related making in this, although sometimes I might, depending on the specifics.
An allowance I’m going to give myself is that house projects can count as the making for the day; if I spend a chunk of time working on cleaning up my studio (which relates to being able to use the space for future making), or if I do some kind of house organizational/decor thing, which might not necessarily be “making” exactly, that counts for me. I had a sort-of-resolution last year to get my studio in order, and it had ups and downs throughout the first half of the year, and then it just got out of control and ended 2014 worse than how it started. So, studio sorting will be a not-so-fun year of making project for the beginning of this year, so that I’ll have the space I need to do sewing projects and fun stuff like that!
Another of my first projects, which I plan to start today, is to make a 2015 planner – I want to be more organized about my work this year, release more patterns, give myself deadlines, stay on track, so I’m going to experiment with an analog paper calendar book. I bought a plain spiral-bound notebook, and Pete’s uncle gave me this great set of nice colored pencils for Christmas (thanks, Terry!), so I’m going to get to work drawing out monthly and weekly calendar pages. Then I’ll plan my year of design, and it’ll be there on paper, much harder to move around than iCal fake-deadlines, which I always end up bumping as designs take longer than they should!
One other random, making-related thing I want to show you… I made some photo books and I’m really happy with how they turned out, so I plan to make more! I wanted some kind of print versions of all the digital photos we’ve taken over the years, on trips and stuff, and I thought it would be fun to make these books instead of just making old fashioned albums :-p
I put the best of Pete’s and my instagram photos into yearly insta photo books; I’m going to start the 2014 edition soon. The insta books include captions for the photos, so in the future we can look back at what we did each year. And then the other 2 are photo books of trips we took, no captions or anything, just a physical book we can have on the shelf. Now that I’ve made a few and I have templates, I can make more pretty easily, of older trips, and future ones! (I used iWork Pages, same as how I make my knitting patterns, to make the PDFs, and then I had them printed by MagCloud, which does very affordable paperback book printing, as long as the page count isn’t too high, since the price is per-page.)
Okay that’s some making, and plans for 2015 making. The first week of the year has been a little off, but I’m hoping it’s going to be a good one! Let’s go!