When I did my August check in I’d already achieved all of 2021’s goals. (August goals post.) So let’s talk about the other non-goals I’d talked about first. (2021 goals post.)
1. Spinning Techniques
I did try out core spinning! I only did a little sample but I’ve got plans for more. My real problem is that I’m not sure what to do with the finished fiber. It’s a bit thick for the stuff I usually make. Still fun just to do it, though.
I took part in a plying sample a long via Jillian Moreno’s patreon, which honestly taught me some surprising things about how much I like marled tonals at different ply levels. It turns out I loved the two and three plies a lot, and I even liked my singles more than I expected. I don’t love commercial single ply so I wasn’t expecting to like it at all, but it was ok. I do think I’ll try to go back and do her woolen to worsted one too.
I did get to know (and love) the new magnetic head for my spinning wheel. But mostly I did familiar stuff and that’s ok because it means I’ve got a bunch of handspun I’m ready to actually use.
2. Being intentional about purchases
I definitely did this one. I stopped following a number of larger yarn companies and started curating my Instagram to include more dyers who were part of marginalized communities. I bought more adorable stitch markers and patterns (even patterns I’m not sure I’ll ever get time to make!)
That said, I still have a bit of a stash problem. But I at least don’t feel like I’ve made it worse? And I do feel like I made a few creators who I admire happy!
3. Dyeing
Did some with my toddler. The solar dyeing and the “dye using tree bits” were fun. I’ve got some more ideas here now that it’s cool enough for us to be outside for this again.
4. Craftsy
I wound up using craftsy for quilting stuff while I was on sabbatical, but after that I haven’t made time for it. So I went to cancel my subscription today and… The phone number they tell you to call is a very scammy “you may have already won a gift card…” message and the whole interaction raised all my red flags as a security person when they tried to charge a cancellation fee and couldn’t use my card on file. Not sure if they were hacked or the company that bought them is just a giant scam.
Normally I’d take to social media to figure out what’s up, but Facebook is down today and no one answered on Twitter, so I’m not sure what to do next. I made sure they had an empty gift card for renewal and I’ll try to dig through my email to see if I had a different cancellation method at the beginning. But I anticipate this only ending with a stop payment on my credit card.
I expected cancellation to be a big pain but that is above and beyond. I definitely won’t be doing business with Craftsy again.
5. Embroidery
I did some! Finished my old psyanky egg, made a dent in my xmas trees, and bought a pretty constellation sampler from kiriki.
Haven’t tried to do anything special on the embroidery front, but that’s ok. Glad that I’m still enjoying it enough to do a few kits per year. It’s a very nice break when I need to do something physically different from knitting. I actually started getting sore from socks so I needed some bread time.
6. Design and design tools
I finally made pyKnit, my python knitting math open source/free project. I’ve used it to adjust things, gave a talk about it at Pycon 2021, and had people working with me on it during the pycon sprints. I’m pretty pleased with that!
I’ve got more that I want to do with it, but I’m glad to say that it got to the point of being useful and being in good enough shape documentation-wise that people could help me. Wish I had more time to hack on it, but that’s always the problem with ideas.
Didn’t release any knitting designs, but I did get one put into pyKnit’s examples, so that’s fun.
In summary…
Despite these being not really goals, I feel like I got pretty far on them. My only regret is Craftsy, which I suspect is going to turn into a giant mess because I can’t seem to cancel the auto-renewal properly.