2017 Year End Totals

This has been a fun year! The family took a trip to Hawaii and we got to sort of see a total eclipse of the sun and I made things. I made a lot more things than I made the year before or the year before that.  Some crappy stuff also happened, but when I look back the good stuff definitely overshadowed it.

One of the most exciting things I did was to start cross-stitching again. After packing my supplies shortly before we moved into this house, I'd thought I was done with it for good. I'd picked up a couple of kits and patterns in the ensuing thirteen years, but I didn't do any actual stitching until I found a cheap little Halloween kit at the thrift shop. While I was still working on that, I stumbled across an estate sale where I found a ton of cheap kits, including that lighthouse, and then I stitched the little tiny Mona Lisa pattern I found in a library book, and the village scene which had been packed away for years in the sewing room...

They're relatively small projects, but I stitched them. And, at just about the time I was realizing I still enjoyed counted cross-stitch, I saw an ad for the estate sale with all the cross-stitch kits. Two months later, we visited the thrift shop and someone had donated all the other cross-stitch kits. And then I went up to my sewing room and dug around until I found all of the kits I'd packed away when I thought I gave up cross-stitching. Then the same store where I found the first batch of kits had all of the vintage crewel kits. (If you're thinking I'm out of my mind, the new-to-me kits I bought this year ranged in price from seventy-five cents to two dollars. You can't buy the fabric for that.)

Clockwise from upper left: the first estate sale, the second visit to the same estate sale after they'd marked prices down, the thrift shop haul, the second thrift shop haul, and my own stash from the sewing room

I made twenty-seven pairs of socks. That's a record for me, three more pairs than I made in 2014, which was the year hubby was laid up and I kept my nerves steady by knitting endless pairs of socks.

It's ten more pairs than I made in 2016. I've stopped questioning the socks. They just happen without my planning for them or thinking about them and periodically I buy more yarn so that they can keep happening. They make me happy. 

That last pair in the collage may or may not be done by the time the clock strikes midnight.

I made fifteen new bags. Vinyl is fun and projects bags are fun and I can always use more bags, especially the big tote bags which I planned for and didn't get around to. There will be more bags, probably lots of them, in 2018.

Do we have to talk about the quilting? This is the same picture I used for my mid-year totals and, except for some block I added to the pink churn dash quilt, not much has been added since then. I lost my will to piece tops at about the same time my machine lost its ability to free-motion quilt.

What's in store for 2018? I plan on getting the sewing machine fixed so that I can finish quilts again. Hopefully that will give me the motivation to piece the quilts. I've been snuggling up in the Snoqualmie Wrap since the weather turned cold and I found out how amazingly useful it is. Now that I realize how warm and cozy it is, I'm digging out a bunch of acrylic that was originally intended for sweaters and adding a ton of shawls to my Ravelry queue, along with all of the socks and other projects that were already there.