Wrapping Up 2023
Another year has flown by. As has become my tradition, at the end of December I like to take stock of my knitting life over the past year to see how I spent it. How much did I knit in 2023? Which project took the longest to make? And what was the most popular blog post in 2023?
Here's a summary of what I knit, designed, and blogged about in the previous 12 months.
Projects
In the year 2023, I completed 20 projects and knit nearly 12 kilometers (about 13,000 yards) of yarn. Converted to imperial measurements that's 7.5 miles!
This was a year of socks and sweaters for me: I knit 9 pairs of socks, 7 sweaters, 2 hats, 1 cardigan, and 1 pair of leggings. On average each knitted item took 3 months to complete and used up 600 m (or 650 yd) of yarn. But there was of course huge variance from project to project.
Two projects share the title of fastest knit in 2023: both of my sample hats for the Rockweed Beanie took only 4 days each.
The slowest project, on the other hand, was my scrap yarn Ohto pullover that took 705 days or just a few weeks short of 2 years to knit. The original pattern that's available free on Novita Knits was designed by Ronja Hakalehto for sport-weight yarn but I modified mine to use fingering-weight leftovers. You might recognize some of the yarns from my previous designs, such as the teal tweed from Tweed Is Still the New Black or the greenish yellow from Matcha Latte.
The smallest knit in terms of yardage were the Rose Quartz Shorties, taking up just 192 meters (or 210 yards) of yarn.
The most yarn consuming project was the red-and-pink Rockweed Pullover sample. I used two lace-weight yarns together for the main body of the sweater which is why this project used up so much yarn: 1520 meters (or 1660 yards), in fact.
Designs
In 2023, I released 8 knitting patterns, two of which were mystery knit-alongs:
3 garments: When the Stars Come Out, Chai Misto, and Rockweed Pullover
3 pairs of socks: Willowbug MKAL, Rose Quartz Shorties, and Fair Isle Sock MKALendar
   1 accessory: Rockweed Beanie, and
1 shawl: Taival, originally released in the Spring 2023 issue of TAITO magazine.
The most popular of these was, understandably, the Fair Isle Sock MKALendar, a free mystery knit-along with nearly 900 hearts and over 200 projects on Ravelry.
Two new sweaters are also in the pipeline. The test knit for Terho Cardigan, a steeked version of Terho pullover, is just finishing up and the pattern will come out in early January 2024.
My latest design is Guilty Pleasure, a casual color-blocked compound raglan sweater. It may look like a one-armed bandit in this WIP photo but the pattern will be ready for test knitting on the second week in January. If you're interested in test knitting, join my mailing list and also keep an eye on the Testing Calls group on the Mighty Networks community.
Blog Posts
My plan is to write a new blog post every other Friday and, by and large, I stuck to that schedule this year. In 2023, I wrote 26 blog posts (including this one).
The most popular blog post of those published in 2023 was Fall/Winter 2023/2024 Knitting Trends (August 2023) with over 5800 views.
Incidentally, the most-read post of the year was Math for Knitters: Knitting with Yarn Held Double with over 34K views in 2023 alone and 111K views in total since it was published in December 2019.
The second place also goes to a blog post that has to do with knitting trends: Spring/Summer 2023 Knitting Trends (January 2023) was read over 1800 times.
The third most-read post and the most popular tutorial of the year was Invisible Cast-on for Toe-up Socks (May 2023) with nearly 1300 views.
The blog post that readers spent the most time on was Revisiting Knit&Note (February 2023) with 11K characters, 1.9K words, and an average read time of 2 minutes and 8 seconds.
But that wasn't even the longest post! The title for the most verbose blog post in 2023 goes to Pattern Round-up: What to Knit with Advent Calendar Mini Skeins? (December 2023) with over 16K characters, 2.8K words, and an average reading time of 1 minute and 46 seconds. Holy speed reading, Batman! Or did you just scroll through the pics? 😉
See you in 2024!
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