2023 Year of Projects Planning

I’ve been participating all year long in the Year of Projects group over on Ravelry and have very much enjoyed getting to know everyone there. Basically, it’s a blogging group of like-minded crafters who post weekly about what they’re working on and most of them also have a goal list for things they’d like to accomplish in the course of a year. The “official” group runs July 1 to June 30 of the next year, but I find planning from January through December works better for me, so that’s how I do my year of projects. Today’s post is going to talk about what I’d like to work on next year, 2023.

KNITTING/CROCHETING:
There’s pretty much always going to be knitting in my plans. I have found that picking too many specific projects, or even types of projects doesn’t work very well for me since I wind up having requests for a gift, or something that I really want to knit that tosses those plans out the window. I found this year that trying to knit a certain number of yards over the course of the year worked best for me and I’m going to continue that trend for 2023, shooting for 23,000 yards knit up (or crocheted).

In addition, I am going to continue my stashdown efforts which I started this year. I’m trying to work through some long languishing skeins in my stash that I love and want to work with but keep getting moved to the bottom of the list in favor of newer things that are on the top layer of my storage bins. I toyed with the idea of going “cold sheep” this year with no yarn purchases, but that’s really not a realistic goal for me so instead, my goal is to try for 9 out of 12 months where my output of yardage is more than my intake of yardage and we’ll see how that goes. I have been participating in the Stash Knit Down group on Ravelry, as well as Socks from Stash group, and finding both of those engaging and helpful in the stashdown efforts.

SPINNING:
The same stashdown principle is in play again for 2023 for my fiber stash. I’ve done very well with no new fiber incoming to my stash, and have been slowly spinning my way through what I’ve got, although I’m a bit off the pace for my 2022 goal of 4 ounces spun per month. I do think that’s a relatively achieveable goal though, so I’m going to repeat that for 2023: 4 ounces spun per month.

CROSS-STITCH:
I am very pleased I achieved my goal of finishing up the big Desert Mandala project this year. That epic project was a major win for me in feeling productive. I have done some work towards my other goal of 22,000 stitches on my full coverage projects, but I’m nowhere near that goal since I concentrated on the mandala so exclusively. I am not going to set any specific goal for stitches in 2023, but my plan for cross-stitch is to focus for 2 weeks a month on one project that’s close(ish) to a finish – Winter’s Encounter, and then I will rotate through the other 5 in-progress full coverage pieces for the remaining 2 weeks of the month (so I’ll be working on those 5 two times over the course of 2023). I will hope to get Winter’s Encounter done, but I’m not going to put a lot of pressure on myself to do so. I should get it pretty close though, with some focused time on it.

SEWING/WOOL APPLIQUE:
I won’t make my goals for 2023 for these two categories in 2022, but I’m okay with that. I have a lot of things I’m interested in working on and these just weren’t priorities, so see below for what I’m changing about these for 2023.

12 MONTHS OF CRAFT EXPLORATION:
I taught myself to crochet in the spring of 2022. (I had only a rudimentary knowledge of crochet… like single crochet edges on knits or to join something.) I realized not only did I really enjoy the craft itself, I also really enjoyed learning something new – or at least making LARGE improvements in some basic skills. So, in light of that, I decided I would like to do more of the same in 2023. I’m going to do a monthly 30-day exploration of either a new-to-me craft or one, like wool applique, that I’ve done some of, but feel like maybe committing to a year of work on something a bit more than I want to tackle. Thanks to all the amazing things you can find online, I’ve found either online tutorials/classes and/or kits that will let me trial some things without committing to adding them to my “forever” list of crafts I want to do. A few of these have seasonal tie-ins, which also appealed to me, so for those projects, I’ve indicated my tentative months I’d like to work on them:

• Sashiko (January)
• Tea blending
• Quilting
• Garment sewing
• Felting (October)
• Candle making
• Origami (September)
• Wool applique
• Slow stitching
• Perfume blending
• Soap making
• Journal/bookbinding

I went to kind of a hippie Quaker school as a kid, so I actually have done candle and soap making, and I have done a fair amount of sewin and quilting, although not much in recent years, so I definitely can use a refresher on all of those.

BOOKS/READING:
Not really a YOP kind of goal, but I have two much smaller/more realistic reading challenges I’m participating in and will probably try to catalog what I’m reading in my weekly posts just to document what I’m up to in that arena.

So those are my goals for 2023! I’m looking forward to switching up a few things to keep this fresh, but also settling in for a few long-term personal goals I’ve set. I’ll do a year-in-review post once we get to the end of December just to hit the highlights of 2022 for those of you interested in that kind of info.