Now and then I feel like my knitting takes longer than it reasonably should.  It's not particularly fair of me since I always get drawn to big projects that are bound to take forever, but it doesn't particularly help with morale.  I often end up feeling like a turtle wading through molasses and as one might imagine- I get a bit frustrated.  Not to say I don't knit for the fun of it, because I definitely do, but I also like to be productive.

So what do I do?  I decide to make a couple of small projects all at once to make me feel a little more effective when it comes to my passion.  Including a pair of nice hats, and the one I'll focus on is this colour work beauty.

I decided to do a bit of speckling fading into the next colour with this hat.  I thought it would be a fun way to do some Fairisle, and make the transitions into the starkly different colours a little less jarring.  

What I didn't realise is that the colour work made me knit notably faster than I had for the previous hat that was all grey.  I came to notice that I got excited for the transitions and pattern development, so my hands worked a lot more quickly.  The grey hat took me 2 weeks of intermittent work while this hat took me less than one week of intermittent work.  

Now that I've noticed this, I see that projects that I do Fairisle with, or the yarn has colour variation that I want to see expressed, knit up far more quickly in my hands than their more basic counterparts.  Which is a blessing and a curse because while I love the changing colours, I also love very basic and simple knitting projects that let the yarn speak for itself- but the knitting hands want what they want, and that's challenge and change.  

So here's to the next year of challenge and change (at least in moderate doses).  I hope all of you have had a wonderful winter, and that you set the New Year off right- with lots of projects brewing in your head and inspiration guiding your forward.

Stay sweet, stay crafty, and stay tuned.