New Release: Alana

The Knit Now issue 83 is out! It is full of beautiful projects including my Alana Pullover!

All photos courtesy of Knit Now magazine.

Alana combines a center front cable panel and complementary sleeve cables with top-down constructions for casual elegance.

Named for the Celtic word for stone and harmony, Alana is a quick and easy knit. Written in 7 sizes.

2018, photo provided by Knit Now

Includes waist and hip shaping for a flattering fit. Cables are charted and written.

Sample knit in West Yorkshire Spinners The Croft Shetland Tweed Aran. When I knit the sample garment, the yarn was brand new and needed to be kept a secret. A quick google search shows it is available now from multiple retailers and I’m thrilled to be able to share it! It was a blast to work with and I really loved the finished garment.

Find this issue at your local yarn shop or bookstore or purchase the digital edition here!

Pattern Spotlight: Route 66

Published in 2016 Route 66 combines a center front chevron panel, ¾ length sleeves and a cowl neck for chic casual comfort. Perfect for cafes, concerts in the park and roadside markets. Route 66 is worked top down with a center front wedge-shaped textured panel and simple stockinette on the rest of the body. The front panel uses simple knits and purls with no cabled stitches. Written in 6 sizes.

I gifted the sample garment to my MIL for Christmas 2016 and she loves it!! She’s a doctor so the sleeves are perfect length for her work. She was wearing it for our Christmas 2017 get-together and the sweater still looks great. It is wonderful to see a handknit gift be loved and well cared for like that!

Route 66 is available through Ravelry, WEBS and LoveKnitting!

Hiking: Now what?

Now that we’ve finished out Grand Canyon hike and the bitter cold of winter has set in I miss all those hours I spent on the trail last year. We haven’t been on a family hike since we climbed out of the Grand Canyon in late November. We need new trails to train for and new trips to plan.

All those family hikes were great for our training. But they were also hours and hours we spent together as a family. We actually talked because you can’t stare at your phone easily when you need to watch the trail. We shared stories and snacks. We enjoyed being outside and away from distractions. You really can’t beat that kind of family time with a teenager and a tween. And we got in pretty good shape while we did it.

I’ve been doing a little looking and haven’t quite decided where we should hike next. After all the traveling we did in 2017, I wonder if we should keep closer to home in 2018. Maybe we could do some of the Colorado Trail that runs north and south through Colorado. Or portions of the Ozark Trail in Missouri. Or the Ouachita trail through the Ouachita mountains in Arkansas and Oklahoma (I didn’t actually know there were mountains there). Or we could head back to the Arizona since there are still tons of trails out there that I would love to share with my boys.

Suggestions?

 

Designing: The Chalkboard Method

Earlier this year I felt like I was in a little bit of a rut as I grow my knitwear design business. I was doing the work, putting in the hours and things were happening.

But at the end of each month when it was time to evaluate my goals for the month, I’d go to my tiny list on the bottom of the monthly calendar and see that I hadn’t quite managed everything. So I went looking for resources and found the Being Boss Podcast. I started randomly picking back episodes that sounded the most helpful to me. One of the first I listened to was Episode #79 on using the Chalkboard Method to set goals near the end of July 2017.

The idea of the Chalkboard Method is to write your goals big and bold in a space that you will see every day while you work with large spaces to fill in as you meet your goals. This sounded perfect for me! Not only would it make sure I saw my goals every day, it would help me focus on where I still had the most open spaces as the quarter progressed. Because it was a podcast, I couldn’t quite visualize how theirs looked so I made up a board that made sense for my goals.

I was so excited I made this 9×11 sheet of goals immediately for the 3rd Quarter and shared it on my Instagram.

Thinking about my goals in quarters instead of in months was the first important step for me. And I actually got it wrong the first time. I was so excited to get started that I wrote a list of achievable goals for a 3-month period….and then realized I only had a little more than 2 months of the quarter left to accomplish them. I decided to leave my goals as written and cut myself some slack if I didn’t complete them since I would be working with many fewer days than I’d originally planned. I transferred the goals to a re-purposed poster board from a middle school science project and put it right behind my laptop on my desk where I could see the goals every day. It worked amazingly well for me. I completed all of my goals even with those fewer days!

I added more detail and more goals for my fourth quarter. 

It worked so well that I did it again for the fourth quarter with more goals and more detail. Again I met or exceeded all of my goals. In 2017, I published 15 patterns, made more than 32 pattern submissions, had one pattern published in a book, sold several patterns to yarn companies and magazines. I’m excited by my 2017 achievements and my forward momentum that picked up since I started using the Chalkboard Method in my third quarter!

I can’t really explain the magic behind it since the concept seems so simple as to be almost silly. But it truly works for me. I’ve always been a list maker and goal oriented. But somehow writing them small made it easy to get off course. While writing them great big really increases my productivity and focus. I’m definitely a convert and plan to continue the process. In fact, when a friend offered me a re-store find of an 8-foot chalk board I said YES!  Because writing the goals even bigger and having the space to grow my goals can’t hurt.

My Chalkboard Goals now cover the entire wall behind my desk. I even gave up a window for it. 

I’m excited to see where 2018 takes me!