Yesterday afternoon I was lying on the kitchen floor, highlighter pens at my side, and was colouring in a giant 2019 wall planner. I used to be able to plan my life month by month, but nowadays I have to plan year by year. When I was younger, I was terrified of confirming future plans (beyond roughly three weeks) but these days I routinely agree to things 12 months in advance. It is a thing and highlighter pens are handy.
We are still waiting for the last confirmations to roll into my inbox, but I am now pretty much fully booked for 2019 workshops. I am obviously not able to say exactly what I’m doing and when, but 2019 will be a mix of some of my favourite places/people and new adventures. Judging by the wall planner I’m away teaching a third of the year, leaving another third for designing and writing. And the last third? Well, it’s allocated to those tricksy things known as “life balance” and “sleep.”
I have been very bad for maintaining life balance and remembering to sleep, and I’ve spent much of 2018 trying to regain that balance (and its siblings “general sanity” and “creative impulse”). While I was writing This Thing of Paper, I was often asked “what did you do today?” and I felt bad saying “I stared out the window and then I went for a walk,” but the truth is that creativity is fuelled by those headspace days. I’m a big fan of the old saying butt, meet chair when it comes to producing creative work, but the productive chair days can only exist when my brain has had time to meander and ponder. And so for 2019 I’m claiming back some of my headspace days. I don’t feel too bad about it either (lie — I totally feel bad about it but that’s my own problem).
I was teaching at the brilliant Perth Festival of Yarn this past weekend - ace place!
I can tell you about three things that will happen in 2019.
The first thing is a personal life event. After thirteen years together, David and I have decided to get married. I do not anticipate writing about this much because, well, it is a private life thing and I’ve never really given weddings much thought beyond “this is nice”. I am making my own dress, though, and once the wedding is over, I am going to be writing a bit about the dress-making process. It’s a non-traditional dress and I’m enjoying the making process already. Friends are running a small KAL of Hunter Hammersen’s Scintillation pattern, so even if they cannot make it, they can still be part of our day. It is beyond lovely. Thank you.
The second thing is that I have teamed up with Stitchtopia Holidays and will be leading a knitting tour to Iceland and the Faeroe Islands next year. As you may know, I’m pretty obsessed with the North Atlantic knitting traditions, and I’m so blooming excited to be taking a group of knitters to the North-East part of the region. We’ll look at local wool products, visit sheep farms, explore fjords, folk museums, attempt whale and puffin-spotting, and pay homage at the Handknitting Association of Iceland among other things. I cannot wait to share my love of the Nordic knitting heritage with everyone.
And the third thing? I’ll be sharing much more as the time approaches, but there is a big, new project looming in the horizon. I never thought I’d do another big thing after This Thing of Paper, but I have words and ideas inside of me once more. It’s quite different to This Thing of Paper but hopefully you’ll like it just as much (or more). It’s a project near and dear to my heart, and one that has been ticking along at the back of my head for years.
Before anything can happen, though, it is still 2018 and I’ll be back in my beloved Copenhagen to teach at Copenhagen KnitWork this month. I’ll be running bilingual knitting classes, so if you only speak English or du kan kun tale dansk, I’ll be there to help you out. It’ll probs kill my brain but what a way to go. See you soon, Denmark.