The Joy of One Project Knitting

 

2024 was the year where I really tried to reduce the number of projects I had on the go at any one time. I didn’t help my cause by starting two yearlong blankets but I had two sweeps during the year to get the numbers down. And now I am enjoying this effort by having very few WIPs and reducing the ones I work on over the same period of time. 

I have put all the blankets into one category of –well,-blankets – so that I work on just one until it is finished before working on another. Sometimes a blanket comes under the easy category and sometimes under the requires concentration category which means that I have to have an easy project ready to grab when both my main project and the blanket project are at require concentration stage. Not quite one project knitting.

In addition to the blanket project I have a main project. And, does it go quickly when that is all you work on. I wrote a post in 2021 that a project will take the same amount of time whether it is spread over a month or a year. Although that is not strictly true as if you are working consistently on the same project you are not delayed by having to check where you are in a pattern which happens when you haven’t worked on something for a while.

I have said many times, I do not know when I became a multi-project knitter. I think it comes from making a gift or participating in a knitalong and when that item is finished, not going back to the project that had been put aside. And that morphed into starting all the things at the beginning of the year so everything I wanted to knit, or thought I wanted to knit got started and then all the projects were worked on throughout the year. This resulted in many finished items in the last quarter of the year but gave me little to show during the year for all the time I was putting in to knitting.

The joy is working on one project and seeing it grow and knowing that when it is finished I can start something new and not go back to a project that was started months previously.

This piece was originally titled The Joy of Monogamous Knitting. Many knitters that work on one project at a time call themselves monogamous knitters. As I was writing and mentioning projects and blanket projects and back up projects, I realized monogamous was a misnomer but as I was searching for synonyms the definition of monogamous always came up in relation to a human relationship. Thus, I felt it was inappropriate to use in a title