New projects for the New Year

I know, it's almost the end of January already, and the year has some of its shiny rubbed off, but it's been a busy few weeks for me, work-wise, so I'm only just starting to think about "New Year" things now.

I have two fairly major, fairly long-term projects that I'm thinking about right now. 

The first is a wardrobe upgrade.  Over the past few years, I've let my work (mostly manufacturing or other dirty or messy jobs) determine my clothing, and while there's nothing wrong with what I'm wearing now, it isn't anything I'm particularly excited about, or feel expresses who I am very well.  So I've been looking at a lot of pictures on Pinterest, and have been coming up with some ideas about texture, structure, drape and function that I'm looking forward to playing with.  I'll be buying some pieces, adapting others, and making some from scratch.  More on that later.

The second is a continuation and offshoot of an idea I heard about on Ravelry. There's this thing called a sock club, where indie dyers team up with pattern designers and send out sock kits on a monthly or bimonthly basis to members of their clubs.  But knitters are like any crafter: when good materials present themselves, you snap them up, whether you have a project in mind for them or not.  In this way, knitters tend to accumulate certain types of yarns, sometimes well beyond what they can reasonably expect to use.  The fairly fine, frequently brightly-colored yarns intended for socks are often problematic for some knitters in this way.  So somebody suggested creating your own sock club: take the yarns already in your stash, match them up with patterns they'll work well with, put them all in anonymous bags, and whenever you finish a project and need something new to work on, you draw a bag.

I did this last year, and it worked really well for me. One of the biggest hurdles for me in terms of being productive is simple decision paralysis.  This removes the decision-making.  So I'll be bagging up yarns and patterns, but I'll also be bagging up other smallish non-knitting projects that have been languishing. 

So, big(-ish) things coming, in the form of a lot of small things.