New Year, New projects and what's this about a newspaper article?

So now that most of my Christmas knits are finished (I was a little too ambitious at short notice), I've moved on to other projects and have enjoyed selecting some fun projects for this year.

The Finished Christmas Knits, The middle scarf ended up being nearly 2 metre long!

I've finally acknowledged the full on fail that my first ever jumper was and I've 'frogged' most of it and re-purposed the yarn for a much more beautiful and hopefully much better cardigan. A test knit courtesy of playsweetmusic on Ravelry. The lovely Grey Matter Cardigan, which I am knitting in a Ben Nevis Aran (ugh, that's the thing about re-purposing, you reuse yarn that you fell out of love with an age ago).

As I've been reunited with most of my stash I thought a quick stash busting exercise was in order a week or two back and I used up some of my Wendy pampas chunky, and one of my Stylecraft Swift Knit to make the lovely Acer shawl by Kourtney Robinson of Dollybird Workshop (She has some amazing patterns, of which I snapped up 8,  so you could be seeing more of her designs here)

My version in serious need of blocking

The Acer shawl makes for a really quick and really warm knit. I just need my brother to disappear back to Uni so that I can use his bed for blocking again :).

As part of the stash busting/de-stashing exercise I'm getting rid of some of the yarns I have desperately tried to find a purpose for but can't. Yes 8 Colinette point 5 balls that is you, your going to a better home! If your interested take a look at the ebay listing.

As I said I've been planning out projects for this year, which is obviously subject to flights of fancy and queue change up. A few of this year's definite knits are

• Grey Matter Cardigan
• Game of Thrones inspired knit (own pattern)
• Aidez (yes thank you Lidl, that Crelando Meli yarn has a home)
• Tie back tank in  Araucania ruca 
• Raven shawl in Kingcraig Lambswool Cashmere Aran

I have a lot more patterns in my library and queue but I'm still not sure of them yet, and this frees me up for lots lots more. 

This year I reckon I might also play around with Arm Knitting a little bit more, to see what else is creatable, whilst still being fit for purpose. This is mostly due to when I was at I knit last I was asked to demonstrate some arm knitting for a reporter and photographer, purely because at the time I was the only person in the store that had dabbled in it (purely out of lack of needles, an out of battery tablet, a borrowed phone and boredom) you can see it isn't really my first choice of medium.  Anyway that all resulted in a larger than expected article in The Times Newspaper which can be found here (if you are a subscriber) or a really bad scanned copy of the article in the physical newspaper below. 

I'm not very good at looking after little bits of paper

The project that I made for the article turned into a very holey shawl, which is currently still residing in the I Knit shop. 

Now that 2013 is over, I would like to say a quick thanks to all the new friends I made and the ones who made things worthwhile though my life kind of stood on it's head. Hopefully 2014 will be much much more fantastic!

#knitting :)