New for 2018

Hi Everyone

Happy New Year for 2018

I’ve had a lovely Christmas break over the last few weeks but it’s time to start 2018 with a new plan ! Each year, as usual, I review my approach to Making. This year, I’ve decided to change the way I organise my work. All the elements from last year, the workshops, writing work, Making Kits, Silver work and knitting will stay but I’m hoping to rearrange my approach to accommodate additional elements. I’d like to work with more materials and am hoping a bit of reorganisation can help me to include a wider range.

On a practical level, I will keep my Silver work as my main daily working activity and knitting will feature as my usual evening ‘hobby’ activity. The rest of my Making life will be organised around a carefully planned ‘queue’ of projects, written up as I work.

Having reviewed last years activity, one of the weaknesses of my system was focusing on a different daily material or activity. Unfortunately, I regularly found myself with lots of unfinished projects. Spending one day per week (only)on a specific project, generally, is not enough ; by the time the following week came around, momentum was lost. I found myself wasting time picking up each week on projects which needed more time and attention. The ‘stopping’ and ‘starting’ seemed to stifle creativity. So, my major change will be to concentrate on particular projects and see them through, however, long it takes. I’m hoping I can build in a ‘working review’ approach to check the value of the project and know when to abandon or continue. 

My first project using this new system will be a felt glasses/pencil case. I’m calling this project The Felt Pocket. I’ll start my project today by devising a basic pattern. I’ll also research some decorative options. This project will form the basis of a Workshop in a few weeks time.

I’m hoping that I can identify and share key features of my projects to share here on the blog along with offering occasional downloads of patterns/ instructions etc. For the moment, I will keep my Friday Fibre feature. This is an important part of my Making world and the regular Friday post helps me to organise how I develop and organise my fibre working skills. Hopefully, my plans will keep things fresh and there will be some interesting news to share here on the blog.

One other thing I’d like to share with you are some lovely Christmas gifts. I’ll select a few items over the next few weeks to share, my first item is this :

                  

This is one of my favourite gifts (from my Dad). It’s a kit from Uist Wool. The kit is a sweater called Lovage and I chose Siaban (dk) yarn. I’m not ready to start, just yet, but I’m very excited about this one. I’ll talk more about this project on Friday along with all the knitting and spinning news from the last few weeks.

Thanks for calling in today.