The end of the year is fast approaching and it is time for the annual review of my year in knitting.  While this was a year in which the political landscape was both depressing and demoralising, the stress-beating power of knitting came to the rescue!  I’ve managed to have a pretty good knitting year, with nine projects finished:

Clockwise from the top, these are:

1.  Paid in Full tank
2.   Sayer tank
3.  Ocean Waters pullover
4.  Offbeat mitts
5.  Cascade Cap
6.  Black Welsh Mountain Cowl
7.  Form pullover
8.  Ojai top
9.  Bousta Beanie

I wrote 55 posts this year, which amounted to 30,000 words.  This is my 388th post since I started the blog.  I had viewers from 103 countries this year, with the top five being the US, Poland, the UK, Canada, and Germany.  The standout for me was experimenting with Fair Isle knitting, which I predict will be a big theme in 2019.  I also did quite a bit of travelling this year and managed to post from a few exotic places.  I had a chance to knit with penguins in Cape Town and hang out with monkeys in Tioman Island, Malaysia.  My most viewed posts of the year were:

1. Knitting and wellness: an interview with Betsan Corkhill
2. Business Class Cowl  (written in 2016)
3. To gusset or not to gusset  (written in 2016)
4. To Carbeth, or not to Carbeth?
5. Multi-strand knitting: one for the cost of two?
6. A show of hands
7. On form
8. 100 on Ravelry

This marks the end of my seventh full year of blogging (I started in late 2011).  It’s hard to believe I’ve been doing this so long.  Yesterday I tried to find a blog post from a knitter I follow and discovered the blog had been deleted.  I did some further research and discovered that almost 80% of the knitting blogs which I follow have stopped during the past two years.  Instagram has increasingly become a go-to medium for knitters, which makes sense as it is a very visual medium.  When I think about it, I realise that the important thing from my perspective is the writing.  I like to write.  It pleases me to put words on paper (metaphorically) with this blog.  I appreciate the visual nature of Instagram and how that has appealed to knitters, but it is the words which draw me and keep me going.

I appreciate the community I feel with this blog and hope that you continue to enjoy it as much as I do.  Best wishes for a Happy New Year!