A New Year, Knitting and Take it Further Challenge

I spent some time wandering around the Internet this evening. On Elaine Lipson's Blog Red Thread Studio she talks about picking a word for the year rather than writing traditional New Year's resolutions. Her word is magic. I thought about what my word would be and I think that it would be abundance. I really have everything that could possibly need but I often find that I need to be reminded to see things that way. Instead of resolutions which I think of as what not to do, I mad a list of goals for this year -- one of them is to stitch, sew and knit from my stash and to try and reduce both my stash and my collection of UFOs.

To that end, I finished the second side of a knitted pillow for my daughter yesterday. This side is worked in a purple fleece yarn with beads on it. The other side is knitted in an eyelash yarn that is purple, pink and electric blue. It will be perfect in her room once she gets her father to paint the walls purple for her.

Since I am done with the pillow cover, I am moving on to some more knitting for myself and am starting Sally Melville's asymmetrical vest from The Knitting Experience Book 1: The Knitting Stitch in a bulky wool, cotton and silk Noro yarn. I started rolling the skeins into balls and making a gauge swatch this morning. I love the subtle and bright variations in color in Noro's yarns. I think that I bought this yarn, now discontinued, 4 years ago.

I have also done some work on my Take it Further challenge piece for January. I made copies of some of the pictures and put them together in a 4" x 6" postcard size. This was my favorite combination.

Then I traced the bear and drew in some of the flow lines on tracing paper. I am going to start to put this on fabric this week.

I have a white silk dupioni remnant and some Impressions in a color called Adobe to play with. I bought the December 2007/January 2008 copy of Stitch magazine at the fabric store today to drool over the stumpwork and goldwork flower on the cover and instead saw the drawn thread and needlewoven panels on the inside of the magazine. I am envisioning a drawn thread bear -- I will have to experiment with taking apart my silk and see what I am able to do with it.