Tomorrow there will be one minute and 8 seconds more daylight than today.  68 seconds of approaching summer.  More than 1/60th of an hour more to collect vitamin D.  6800 precious milliseconds of added solar sustenance.

Not that I’m counting.

2008 has been laid to rest and I look back on it with satisfaction.  It was a good year, and one of the things that makes me happy from a fiber arts perspective is that the ratio of things I started to things I finished was far closer to the magic 1:1 than ever before.  Not that I don’t still have a backlog of unfinished items, indeed I do.  But the rate at which the ufo pile grows is much slower than it used to be.  I’m more willing to admit that I’ll never finish something simply because I don’t like it or don’t like knitting it.  More willing to cut my losses, return the unused yarn, and move on.  More willing to just say no to enticing little numbers that would pull me off the track.

I completed these things in 2008 –

Knitting
The Dale of Norway Nagano sweater
The Serenity baby blanket
The Clapotis scarf
The double-soled slipper socks
The Manly-Man socks
The giant Sea Scallop Shawl

Weaving
The giant living room rag rug
One Snowflake twill table runner

Needlepoint
The gingerbread house Christmas ornament

Books
Bretz’s Flood
A Prayer For Owen Meany
A Dog In A Hat
The Forgotten Garden
The Egyptian
Albion’s Seed (part 1)
Lance Armstrong’s War
Truck
Track of the Cat
Deep South
Blood Lure
The Game of Kings
Patty Jane’s House of Curl
The Pillars of the Earth
… and more I don’t remember

Two pairs of socks… did you notice?  Me! Socks! Finished!

I’m still plugging away on Irish Moss.  I started the back a couple of days ago and am making good progress. 

I dropped a stitch on the poor Rose of England and will simply have to start over, it is irretrievable… but we won’t talk about that.  Lalalalalalala what was I saying?

There is a boatload of more Blackwater Abbey yarn coming my way soon, which I have promised to whip into an afghan, and I did start the Sheelagh Shawl from Gladys Amedro’s book over the holidays, using the exquisite super thin Shetland Supreme that Sharon Miller sells on her site. 

Knitting has become less of an entertainent device and more of a practical art, which is what it should be.  Even though I sometimes get bored with the same item day after day,  I seem to be more capable of anticipating and working toward the end result.  A little more “sticktuiveness” has made it into my life somehow.   Knock on wood.

As for 2009, I thought about making a resolution or two, but haven’t quite done it.  What came to mind when I attempted to think of what to resolve was the first line of an old hymn:

I am resolved no longer to linger,
Charmed by the world’s delights….

Now is it just me or does that sound like someone has decided to kill themself?  It goes on, though:

Things that are higher,
Things that are nobler
These have all lured my sight.

The chorus:

I will hasten to Him
hasten so glad and free (here the men have an echo part that steps down the scale “hasten glad and free-ee”)
Jesus, greatest, highest
I will come to Thee

I don’t go to church anymore and mostly I think of organized religion as the ultimate manipulation of people, but the hymns, they will never leave me.  Hymns I don’t even remember that I remember come to me at the oddest times, and I find that I can still sing at least the entire first verse.

But Things that are Higher and things that are Nobler…. what could be bad about that?

Happy New Year!