Friday catch-up

This week is brought to you by All The Stripes. Seriously though, is there anything that raises the spirits more than a freshly handknit pair of stripy socks - apart from the sheer joy of casting on another pair of course.

I released my new pattern yesterday. The Feel Better Socks kept me company (and also saved my sanity) during our recent household encounter with Covid. The combination of gorgeously clever hand-dyed stripes (thank you Giddy Yarns) and a fun cable proved to be the perfect level of entertainment that my stressed out brain needed.

If you’ve found me via Substack, as opposed to my social media you might not be subscribed to my Mailerlite newsletter - this is where I keep people abreast of all my latest pattern releases and I also offer early bird discounts and periodic pattern sales. I don’t send these out via Substack for various reasons related to GDPR mainly, so if you want to be kept in the loop about new pattern releases you can sign up to my sales newsletter using this link.

Making me smile this week

• After my success of meeting my Plastic Free July goals I am keen to stack a few more good habits on top of those I established last month. Habit stacking is something I read about recently which makes so much sense to me. Then I came across

  Sahil Bloom
  and his concept of ‘if I repeated this action for 100 days would my life be better or worse’. And I found this to be a really helpful way of framing those small, everyday microdecisions that go a long way to shaping our life overall.

• The power of co-working. I recently took part in not one but two co-working sessions, one with Claire Venus of Sparkle on Substack and one with Sara Tasker of Entre Nous. At first I don’t mind admitting that I was a bit sceptical. I couldn’t see how me joining a Zoom call and then us all turning off our mics and working on projects silently and separately would help me at all. But I reckoned without the human psychology of a co-working session. There’s something very calmly motivating about being part of a group, collectively working and focusing on a specific task. The fact that you are all working on different things doesn’t seem to matter, it’s the fact that you have all come together to share time in this way that seems to be the real factor here. And I was so surprised at how much I got done.

• The Gideon Method for working through your projects. I came across this just this morning while reading the new Substack by Martyn of the Knit365 blog. It’s a method he talks about for when you are overwhelmed with your works-in-progress and need a way to prioritise them. Definitely something that is much needed here. You can read the article here and I really recommend subscribing to his Substack too if you are at all crafty related.

Hmmm…now I’m thinking. And wondering whether there might be some mileage in combining the idea of a co-working session and a ‘finish our WIPs’ session - a kind of virtual knit night if you will. Where we each bring a project we want to work on and use the collective force of a co-working session to hold ourselves accountable and actually get some knitting done.

Definitely something to ponder. If that sounds like something you’d be interested in do let me know in the comments and I’ll have a ponder some more.

For now, I’ll wish you a happy weekend and may the force be with you, whatever you are working on.