keeping up the pace

I bet you thought I'd slipped away into non-blogging land again, didn't you?
Well, I don't blame you! It nearly happened.

We've been enjoying the start of the Winter school holidays here. I say that quite ironically as yesterday morning the children greeted us with a 6:20 wake up! That's earlier than we normally get up for school!

The wonderful thing about Winter school holidays is that they coincide perfectly with the Tour de France, so there's been lots of knitting into the wee hours, while pretending that I'm watching the cycling. I wonder than my DK hasn't caught on to it. Sometimes he stays up late with me, but often he's in bed first. And then when I go to bed, he'll ask, "So what happened? Who won?" And I'm never really quite sure.

I'm also having a bit of a tidy up of my design schedule, which sounds quite fancy. The reality is that I have no schedule or organised approach what so ever. I tend to just knit what I feel like or what I'm inspired by. I'm quite fickle at times and will often toss aside a knit in favour of something that excites me much more. While this does generally keep the knitting mojo strong, it does mean there are quite a few designs/garments that are yet to see the light of day.  Quite a few. And it's not that they are flawed, just my approach is!

So I have a plan.

I'm going through all my half-knit garments and half written patterns and giving them an order to be tackled. I plan to tackle one here and one there, fairly sporadically so I don't get bogged down in some great catch up of UFOs. That would never work for me.

I also plan to make better use of my visual diary to record pattern ideas and notes, rather than always diving in head first or hoping that I remember. I used to be much better at this, but then the kids started getting into my journal and it all fell to pieces. I have the most beautiful journal that my sister made me for Christmas, I've been wanting to start using it, but to be honest, it seems to nice to write or draw in! Particularly as my drawing skills are pretty, well, let's call my style naive, shall we.

First up in my plan is to get this pattern out there:

I started knitting this in September 2009, when we were on holidays in Tasmania, but ended up ripping out the entire cardigan and shelving it for almost a year. I finished it September 2010. My aim is to have the pattern ready for release before September 2012.

I've looked it over and re-edited it and it's ready for the testers, which I just need to organise.
I'm going to re-knit it in a bigger size in WOOLganics Sangha, the most glorious orange.

Why orange?
Well, this is a leprechaun inspired knit. Leprechauns are one of my favourite small folk, I really adore them, and Toby is about as mischievous as a leprechaun, so it's perfect for him.

In the meantime, I'm frantically knitting away at a sleeve.. Frantically.

Hmm, perhaps I need a list of my designs in waiting to keep me honest.