Goodbye 2020

How do I begin?

I won’t be sorry to see the back of this year, and I consider myself to be one of the ‘lucky ones’. As a child, when I thought about the year 2020, 30 years into the future, I thought about how great a year it would be. By then, surely we’d be in contact with aliens and travel in spaceships; there’d be a cure for AIDs and we’d have World Peace. Early this year, all I hoped for was a return to Tokyo in September, where anything and everything seems possible. 2020 you were a massive let down.

But unlike so many others, I was lucky this year. Despite my everyday life being turned on it’s head, I’ve survived it relatively unscathed, and maybe I’ve learnt some things. Here’s hoping 2021 is a better year for everyone.

I did want to come here today, because damn it, for the last 2 years I’ve blogged from January to May, and then I’ve stopped. Clearly, I have every excuse for this years disappearance. So I’m going to make a miserable attempt at recalling this year from May until now, at least through my knitting, with some added tidbits.

Since March, I’ve been WFH full-time. Rediscovering my local takeaway coffee shop was a blessing for the few weeks whilst weening myself off coffee (not that there’s anything bad about coffee!). Winter came on and with it, so many jigsaw puzzles. I’ve completed several on my own, D is not the jigsaw type. I also have many more jigsaws waiting in the wings for dare I say it… the next lockdown or a holiday at a beach house? I know which I’d prefer.

I made our own masks, but I found them impossible to breathe in, my 1 hour of ‘allowable’ exercise was reduced to a panicked 30 mins. In the end I found the Uniqlo masks MUCH better to breathe with.

The cancelled Bendigo Sheep Show weekend, came and went. A couple of awesome people, took it upon themselves to host their own show online and on You Tube. Some excellent enabling occurred, and for me, it might have been a turning point in confidently and ferociously purchasing yarn online for the remainder of this year. I began a new version of the Birkin sweater (which was to be my knitting group’s signature sweater for the show), well, it will be ready for next year’s show now.

A few distractions occurred in my plans to cast-on and knit a sweater and a pair of socks each month this year. In my birthday month, I also decided to begin a crochet blanket that I long, longed for. And that ‘Stephen West’! inspired me to knit this brilliantly colourful shawl in the later part of this year, don’t ask me which month, sense of time is lost on this year.

This year, I knit, and knit and knitted. All in all, I completed 5 sweaters for myself (a record!), made my mum some socks by urgent request, and Damian was also lucky enough to receive 2 pairs this year! … he still wants his Halloween socks though…

I’m not sure what else happened this year.

I know this year has affected the productivity of a lot of crafters, but I found great comfort in my knitting. It is the year that I’ve knit the most in, and I’m sure if I did the numbers, it’s also the year that I’ve bought the most yarn in. Ah… pandemic, what is one to do?

Happily, it is the end of the year and I welcomed it with great enthusiasm. The Advent calendars by Danni of Half-baked Hand-dyed and also from Little Woollie, made the crawling of time to Christmas so much more joyful.