My “resolutions” for the New Year!

I’m joking because if you treat something as an actual resolution, it’s so much easier to give up and forget about. However, I really do like treating each January as a fresh start. I screwed up some stuff in 2016, and I did some things right too. 2017 is a new book and I look forward to writing it!

There are a few things I’m looking to change/start, and I figured I might as well share them on here.

Number 1 is probably the one that could be called a resolution if I felt like doing so. In my crochet life, I’m very much all over the place. I find a great pattern, vow to make a ton of items with it, and then I go on Ravelry and get lost in “I need to try that instead”.

So besides orders and special projects for family and whatnot, I’m going to spend a certain amount of time “stocking up” on multiple colors/versions of the same item. This helps me in several ways…

1. I need more inventory
2. When I post something for sale/have a booth at a fair, I always get questions like “my daughter really likes this hat but do you have it in other colors for my niece too?” And if I’m not stocking up on several colors of items, that’s turning a 2-3 item sale into a 1 or even zero-item sale because they wanted to buy other things but can’t.
3. It gives me more practice!

I sort of started this by accident because I was working on this hat during the New Year…literally, I made most of it December 31st and finished it off in the early hours of January 1st.

Gorgeous, right? Actually for some reason, an in-progress picture of this hat on New Year’s Eve got me probably the most likes I’ve ever had on Instagram. It’s at like 110 and counting. (I know that’s not much for most of you but my average is about 25-30.)

And then yesterday, January 1st, I wasn’t feeling well so I made another one…

And it’s only gotten worse from there…

I’m not going to set some frame on it like “I have to make the same pattern for an entire month” or “I have to make ten items”. For one thing, the month one would be stupid because there’s a lot of craft sales in February so I’d really only get to stock up on one item! And going by number would suck because stuff like this bun hat can be done in an afternoon or two, but other things are much more complicated.

So I’m just going to follow my gut. Once I’ve made probably 5 or 6 of these hats, I’ll move on to something else. But for now, I’m really enjoying them! We’ll see if I start on number 4 today because I’m still not feeling great…on day 2 of 3 days off, which is total bullshit that I never call in sick so when I’m scheduled for 3 consecutive days off, THAT’S when I get sick. Grr.

Anyway, on to my other idea for the new year!

I’ve always wanted to do a temperature blanket. But I’m planning to move across the country during this year, hopefully in May or possibly August. So do I do it for just one of the cities? Do I start in my current one and have the major change when I move? Plus they’re two opposite and fairly intense climates (Texas and Michigan) so either way, it would take a lot of work.

So I had another idea.

I’m going to do a MOOD blanket! I’m not sure exactly how but I’m thinking a 1-10 scale. 1 would represent a shitty day that just needed to end, 10 being a day that I would be happy to relive forever. And 5 of course is just a totally “meh” day that I won’t really remember. I’m guessing most of my days will be between 4 and like 7-8, and that’s okay. That’s fairly normal. But I think it would be fun to end up with a blanket that immortalizes my actual experiences of the year!

Let me know how you feel about any of these ideas in the comments please! Feel free to share better ideas too, my brain isn’t working great lately so this may be a really dumb concept. I don’t know, what do you think?