How did that happen?

I can't believe it's the end of January already. How did that happen?! Seems like only yesterday I was looking forward to a new year and now we're at the end of the first month already.

This week has been as crazy as the rest of January. Yarn finally arrived for a new design on Monday. The deadline was supposed to be today. It's crochet! I can crochet fast, not as fast as I can knit, but however fast I am there was no way I was going to meet that deadline. Fortunately the editors knew that so the deadline has been adjusted but I'm still crocheting as fast as I can. It's a secret project so I can't share anything yet but I'm very excited about it.

I have sneaked in the odd row on the new bright pink shawl. Not enough to make much of a difference though. The rows are very long.

 It's been a difficult week. After teaching on Tuesday I was in a lot of pain. I slept badly Tuesday night and woke up at 3am Wednesday morning. Yesterday my back and neck was extremely bad and being extremely tired didn't help. Anyone who suffers from chronic pain knows tiredness makes pain a lot worse. So I didn't do much yesterday. I crocheted, I slept, I went to bed early. That was about it! I had planned to be much more productive today. I started off writing up a new pattern. Got halfway through it then popped in to town to go to knit group for an hour. Came home and felt exhausted again. Back is better than yesterday but still bad. I had a long lunch with plenty of crochet then took my dress form, a stack of new shawl designs and Simon's camera out to the garden to get some prelimenary photos of some new designs. I've just reviewed them and 99% of them look rubbish. I only spent about 30 mins out there but came back inside in agony. 

I'm supposed to be finishing writing a pattern and replying to some e-mails but I'm really not feeling up to it. I'm feeling guilty because I haven't blogged since Monday. 

So let's not focus on all the bad stuff. Let's focus on something positive instead. One of my goals this year was to become more organised and more efficient. I do most of my computer work from the sofa as sitting at a desk hurts my neck/back a lot more. But i feel so much more efficient and organised when I work at the desk. So I've been trying it and my pain levels have been much higher this month. So now i'm doing a mix of working at the desk and taking my laptop downstairs to work on the sofa.

 I bought a fancy organising pad from Paperchase a few weeks ago. It has sheets with columns for each day. I'm using it to plan my week better. So far it's working. I think if I decide to carry on with this, I may make something on the computer and print it myself. Not sure whether it's financially a good idea to buy a fancy pad like this. Brightens things up a bit though.

I also printed off some freelancer's worksheets a while back (I can't remember where I got them from now). But they've got things like analyzing how much time to spend on different tasks etc. I want to track how much time I spend doing various things and especially how much time various designs take in terms of knitting time and pattern writing time. I haven't used these forms yet but they may inspire me to track my time better.

 I organised my work room. Sometimes, when I'm feeling fancy I call it a studio. That seems a bit too posh really. It's the smallest bedroom, it's tiny, it has a large desk, lots of shelving and a knitting machine, it's cramped and no matter how much i organise it it'll always look like a mess.

There's still stuff to do. I need to tidy up my bookshelves and as it looks like I need a third shelf soon, I may go through my books and have a destash soon.

 I went through all my yarn stash recently and sorted it all into boxes. I've got dk and thicker in one box. Only complete balls/skeins get in these boxes. Part balls/skeins go in a different box and gets used for workshops and swatching.

My 4ply and laceweight stashes are in separate boxes. Plus one box for yarn currently allocated to magazine designs.

Some pretty yarn arrived this week. This is the new Manos del Uruguay sock yarn which is due out soon. These skeins are already packed up and will be posted out to my knitters today. I love the colours. They're bright and gorgeous and I'm really looking forward to sharing with you what I'll be doing with these skeins.

Now, I'm going to ignore my e-mails and go and crochet. I've got a deadline!

Oh and there's some new yarn in the shop this week. I'm hoping to list some more tomorrow.