Where do I want my crafting to be in a years time? Or the actual question which has been driving me up the wall recently, where do I as a person want to be?  My crafting is not separate from myself.  It is not an extension that is not affected by who and how I am.  It is who I am, it is what I do.  Crafters are people who will look at things and automatically think I can make that, or how did they make that, and actually go out looking for an answer.  Even if they never make the things, that is how their brains work.  They are intrigued by details, they look for signs of workmanship and finesse.  If you sew, you will turn garments inside out and look at how seams were finished.  If you knit, you will make your friends stand still while you look at the stitch pattern on their new cardigan.  I digress.

So, back to the main issue at hand.  I have been improving my technique.  I can now knit without really tensioning my yarn.  This for me was a game changer.  My hands would cramp up after an hour or so of knitting or crocheting.  I hold my yarn the same way for crocheting and knitting, it just hangs there.  If you have cramp issues try different ways of holding your yarn it might help.

I believe that if you can knit and purl you can do all kinds of knitting.  Everything else is just another variation of that.  The things I do want to improve are my photography, pattern writing and my design.  I want to design bolder things, write them out better and take amazing pictures of them.

I want to lose weight so I can model the things I make without feeling subconscious.  That is related to my crafting in a round about way, I will sometimes shy of certain things because of fearing they might make me look bulky or boxy.  See what I mean, about how everything is related.  I might even shy of certain colors because I feel they will attract too much attention.

I also want to get better at cables, fairisle and intarsia.  And maybe even learn to spin properly.

That is it folks, the week is over, it was a lot of fun.

A tool to covet? One tool? That is not fair.  I love my tools. ALL OF THEM.  And when I don’t love them I can’t use them.

But my number one tool is my iPad.

I use it for so many things.  I use it to browse ravelry, pinterest and flickr.  I find inspiration in these places.  I use it to sketch designs using Paper .  I use Evernote to keep notes on ideas and stitch counts when I need to, it is awesome that it is all in the cloud so I can access my notes from any device.  I use Knit Counter to count stitches and rows.  I use it to read my knitting magazines and knitting ebooks. I use both Kobo, iBooks and Kindle because sometimes you can’t find a book in one, you can usually find it in the others.   I have the craftsy app and I use it to learn new techniques and take really interesting classes (they have an awesome Pizza making class, it is not knitting, but you can’t knit on an empty stomach can you?).  I also use the Blogsy app for blogging.  And I watch movies while I knit.  So it is an all around great tool.  It is almost always with me, so I can do all of these things on the go.  I use GoodReader to keep my pdf files and patterns, it also connects to your ravelry library.  If you don’t have an iPad but have an android tablet you can still do all of these things, just find the alternative android app.

I also had to mention my nostepine because it is the most awesome thing ever.  It is just a wooden round thing. Right? Wrong!  I hate messy yarn balls.  I love pretty looking yarn.  I sometimes wind yarn just for fun.