Happy belated New Year everyone!

A lot of years, it’s not until the year end wrap up that I truly understand how much I did during the previous 365.25 days.  This year even though the total yarn mileage was a bit of a shock, I was completely aware all year that I was busy.  I nearly didn’t do this post at all.

2022 ended with us knowing we were going to be redoing the shower in the bathroom.  After way too many trips to hardware stores and bathroom showrooms, we finally decided and by the end of May, that hurdle was cleared.  No more water issues in the house.  Or so I thought. By the time the multiple water debacles in the Summer were over with, we’d “invested” 3/4 of the total amount I paid for my first house back into this one.  That meant laying low for the rest of the… well probably the rest of the decade.

Happily, since I’d decided to purchase a new camera before all of the excitement and had funded it entirely without using household money, we still had a way to get out and do low guilt, low cost, local and mostly local day trips.

The renewed interest in photography came about because Bandit had decided he’s an outdoor cat (on a harness only, per the agreement I signed with the rescue) and so I was spending more time outside and taking well lit photos.  Our house was built in the 70s and natural light wasn’t a priority. Grey has been the unfortunate victim of me re-learning how to apply the guide numbers on my flash for indoor photography.  She feels I estimate far too close when guessing at the distance from my subject.  She’s learned to blink when I raise a camera then provides me with a super judgey look afterwards.

September saw the beginnings of me bringing more of my computer related infrastructure and services under our roof again.  Only the websites and email are still hosted elsewhere as of this writing and that may yet change as well.  I didn’t think I’d enjoy the IT stuff because I’ve spent so long trying to get out of the industry but while it’s been occasionally frustrating, It’s also been very rewarding on the whole to finally have things running the way I’ve wanted for a while.  #PossibleControlFreak

In September, the Pfaff Switches came back too.  I didn’t announce it here though until later in the year. That was a massive effort on the part of SMS along with PD60.  It was probably worth it though to have us all stop harassing them to get them back into production.   Other than the switches though, I didn’t do a lot of sewing machine work thanks to the house drama.  Mostly it was machines that didn’t offer me any real opportunities to share knowledge so there were no real posts about those this year.

October was the big fibre push.  As an aside, I’m always hesitant to use the word “craft” because I think we’ve largely lost sight of what the word means. Here’s what dictionary.com says:

And yet so many of us undervalue our craftsmanship to the point of undermining those around us who share the same skills. Nowhere in that definition do I see “little worth” yet we often treat “craft” like that.

November began the phase where I started listening to my body and what it was screaming at me.  That lead to a basically full stop on nearly everything I do.  I couldn’t hold a lathe chisel safely, couldn’t turn a screwdriver or pull apart a plastic sewing machine.  Could no longer spin or knit without pain.  I couldn’t lift a camera to my eye anymore. Using a computer mouse aggravated my elbow to the point where I’d need ice after a couple of hours (which is not a lot of time if you’re a Systems Administrator and have done double digit hours a day and six to seven days a week for more than 25 years.) I couldn’t open a milk carton even if I could get it out of the fridge.  Cutting up some dinners were a no go unless I had a really sharp knife.

Eventually even I can notice that something has to change.

All I could really do was putter around, and do small pick up and put down things.  My elbow and thumb were in a brace many of my waking hours and we stocked up on ice packs so I could alternate heat and cold.  I tried to learn to mouse with my left hand but it didn’t go well.  I limited myself to 20 -30 minutes of spinning or knitting a day and only if it didn’t hurt still from the day before.  30 -60 minutes a day on the computer wasn’t quite enough to keep up with emails and such.  To maintain a small part of my sanity, I started reading my backlog of magazines and books finally – to the point where I was consuming an average of 3+ full length novels a week and a couple of magazines.

In December, I broke my self-imposed rules and wrote a few blog posts.  At Ryan’s staff Christmas party (held at one of those “games” places), he told me he’d never bowled before and wanted to try.  I tried to bowl left handed but switched a couple of times.  Then a few days later, I found out I’d actually torn the common flexor tendon not just inflamed it.  That was what it took to finally take it seriously. So,.. not much to say about the rest of the year, other than I hope the house got whatever was in its system out!

The upside of the rest is that I’m allowed light stretching exercises now and I can hold a camera, feed myself and do some spinning and computer work.  I still don’t want to try turning because I was told in no uncertain terms that the chisel was the boss when I tried back in November.  I’ll give that a couple more weeks or so.

The final spinning yardage for the year was in excess of 5,535 yards or 5+kms (somewhere over 3 miles) of yarn made which ends up being more than 15 kms (once you consider the singles and the plying) spun and around 1450gr (just under 3.25lbs).  And yes, I’m Canadian – we mix and match our imperial and metric measurements.

This tally includes 2 of the 3 projects I started in November.  As I write this and add photos, I realize I forgot to add one skein to my fibre stash database. I didn’t even photograph it finished! This is the support spindle project I mentioned.  In the end, it was plied with a silk thread.  It’s wound and ready to knit.  I’m considering combining it with some of the black merino / vicuna and making a pair of light weight wrist warmers.

2024 started with only 2 spinning UFOs. One of them is the flax which is typically an outdoor thing for me, so I’m not surprised it waited.  The other UFO, I’m on track to finish this month, even with the self imposed shorter spinning sessions. That’s the fibre in the lower right corner in the photo above.

Not many pairs of socks made on the CSM this year.  Mostly just what I managed before it warmed up for the year.

There was a sweater, a pair of cat toys with wool and catnip in them and a couple of smaller cabled projects, including this last project that I made in hopes I could reclaim my knitted blanket from the cats.  I didn’t.  They now have 2 cabled things to sleep on.

3 woven projects – which is really unusual for me. I often struggle to turn out one.

A handful of turned items but not much since one of the rooms in the basement that kept getting flooded was the room the lathe is in.  I was in there so often to look for water, I just couldn’t get into turning and then I couldn’t control a chisel by the end of the year due to injury.

What else?  Oh!  I finished v2.0 of the eSpinner.  At last estimate,  there’s likely a couple hundred hours into CAD – designing and testing and redesigning parts.  I’ve been using it since February and I have only one thing I’d like to modify.  A slightly different pulley setup so I can better use all of the whorls on the flyer.  That should let me speed it up without cranking the speed up so high.

And let’s not forget the house projects I just had to do and reassembling my project car.

Oh and one more milestone:  More than 4600 photos with the camera and none of them product shots for the shop. Possibly half that again with the phone but I can’t get to those photos at the moment because the server they’re on is in the middle of being converted to Linux from Windows as I write this.

Here’s to living in less interesting times for 2024! May we all live in boring times.