New year, new projects!

Some rambling before the actual stuff I'm working on, but I'll get to the things I'm making eventually, I promise!


I'm a little embarrassed to be taking life advice from Buzzfeed clickbait articles, but I actually really liked their advice about forgetting resolutions (which I just end up shaming myself for failing to accomplish) and instead making a note of all things I want to remember having done. If I'd had one of these jars in 2014, it might have included the following:

• I started a new job, which got me a little raise, great benefits, useful connections and work experience, and a bunch of wonderful, supportive bosses and coworkers
• I travelled for fun, including going to Niagara Falls for the first time
• I took a 6-week introductory ASL class.
• I made a truly kick-ass Halloween costume, and mastered a bunch of new skills to do it.
• I took a laser-cutting training class and got certified to use the machinery. And made a really cool hand-bound journal with a laser-cut cover.
• I sang my baby nephew to sleep with a 16th c. Scottish Gaelic lullaby.
• I actually went the museums in my city -- art museums, science museums, all kinds of things

All told, 2014 was a pretty good year when you look at it like that :)

So far, in 2015, my jar (a plain jar, thankyouverymuch) contains a single item: "1/1/15: Learned to make paper cranes." A single gold crane is sitting at the bottom of my jar, waiting for its fellows. 

One of the things I would love to add to my jar this year is actually getting my act together and starting my etsy store. The main thing I plan to sell is still in the planning phases, but for aaaaaaaaaages I've looked at those snag-free stitch markers and thought "I could totally make these -- why am I spending money on this? I should really learn how these are done."

So yesterday, I finally made that happen. 

I've been reading 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and felt compelled to make Verne-inspired markers. 

I'm calling these Nautilus (sized for sock knitting -- up to size 4 needles, probably)

These are Nemo (sized for sweaters - up to 9 or 10, probably)

This is one of each of the sizes I've made.

My plan is sell them in baker's dozens: sets of 12, with one extra marker a size larger but with the multiple beads to serve as the beginning-of-row one-off. I made four or five dozen yesterday (four full sets, and a number of experiments), and I think at this point I can make a dozen in under half an hour, and there's still a lot of fumbling -- especially since I couldn't get the size beads I wanted, and the 11s are really tight on the 18g wire. Once I get supplies that cooperate with me and get a little more practice, I bet I can crank out a dozen in 10-15 minutes, which is totally sustainable for keeping in my store! 

I've slipped them on my current knitting, and once I've used them for a while to make sure there aren't any major issues, I'm going give some to local knitting friends for beta testing, then off we go into the wild world!

Anyway, that's what I've been up to this weekend. More anon!