I know what you’re thinking. Where did the holiday season go?

Well, that’s what I’m thinking, anyway. How did 2015 happen so fast? My goodness it was gone in a flash.

I feel like I just set up my Christmas tree, and now it’s already time to put it all away. This is why people leave their trees up until Valentine’s Day. The holiday season is just too busy to adequately sit and enjoy the Christmas decorations! I never understood why we take all the lights down in January anyway. It’s so cold and dark until April, we really NEED those cheerful lights.

My update for you today is about taking some time to enjoy my hard work from the past year. You see I really enjoy knitting and photographing my projects, so it’s fun for me to review the work. What I was really fascinated by, however, is what YOU find most interesting.

I’m doing what we’re all doing which is taking an inventory of the old year, and planning for the new one.

Today’s post, in a nutshell, is going to be my top 10 most popular Pinterest Pins of the year AND my top 5 most popular blog posts. I felt that looking at the pins would give me an idea of what to really work on in 2016, as well as introduce you my Pinterest site.

Sharing the top 5 blog posts is another good way to introduce you to my work from the past year. I publish a post once a week, at least, so it starts to add up. It can be daunting to go back through all those posts! That’s why I thought sharing them today would be fun and interesting (for us both).

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Without further delay, here are my top 10 pins for the year.

They are shown in order of popularity, and these 10 pins are part of my overall top 20. I’m rather proud that my own photography of my own products or services comprise half the list when I have almost 8000 total pins on the boards.

Number One

Number Two

Number Three

 

Number Four

 

Number Five

Number Six

Number Seven

Number Eight

Number Nine

Number Ten

Clearly there’s a trend! If I can come up with something that includes vintage, snow and my Golden Retriever in knits, I will have a winning combination! Must give that some thought!

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And now, let’s take a look at Blog Posts that were most popular.

Number One: Prolix Redux. This is one of my shortest blog posts all year! Laura linked to my site from her site, so I’m sure that accounts for a lot of the traffic. Though she actually linked to the Cheers Shawl post rather than the mitts posts. Interesting.

Number Two: Laura Nelkin Presents Prolix, a Fingerless Mitt Pattern. This post featured mitts knit by my good friend and knitter extraordinaire, Sara Orton. She made these from the new book that was just published by Laura Nelkin. Our LYS, The Yarn Club, hosted Laura Nelkin in March. I had the honor of both meeting Laura and photographing her in her new shawl design made just for Yarn Club, Cheers. It is a high point for me, and receiving such validation from Laura was very encouraging to me. When Laura likes your work, you are doing something right! So keep going and remember that.

Number Three: The Care of Magical Creatures. This post happened during the crazy snow storms we had last winter. I wrapped Willie, my Golden Retriever, in the Harry Potter inspired scarves I had, and took his pictures in the snow. I am a big Harry Potter fan, so that’s where the title and theme came from. This is one of those dogs in knitting in snow themed photo shoots I talked about earlier. Now….if I had just had something vintage to go along with this.

Number Four: The Free Knitting Pattern. It is suggested that designers post a few free patterns to give people an idea of what to expect from paid patterns. People can see how we write and what the pattern design is like. This is my first free knitting pattern. I was still experimenting with fonts and logo, and indeed, I still am. I resolve to finalize a logo design and stick with it in the new year.

Number Five: Last but not least, my Crafting an Old School Halloween post scored pretty high on the list. This is one of the revamped style blog posts I’ve been published since coming home from Creative Live. If you don’t know, I was selected to be part of a Bootcamp Audience for April Bowles-Olin, the Blacksburg Belle, in September. That was definitely a high point for my year.

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So there’s my 2015 summed up in 750 words. What’s up for 2016? Well, quite a bit. I will be producing more videos in the new year including tutorial type videos to help with your knitting technique. My big, BIG goal is to have my first couple of online classes produced. And I want to get the back log of patterns published. I have some really cool things that are just sitting there as notes in spiral bound notebooks and pictures waiting on external hard drives. Definitely getting that together. I’m submitting my first designs to a couple of magazines, and with luck they will pick some of those to publish. Keep a good thought for me!

If you have anything special you would like to see in 2016, please drop me a line and let me know! I’d love to hear from you.

And to answer the million dollar question, “What are you doing New Year’s Eve?” Well, I’m going to be knitting on a project just for me and mentally prepping for the all the exciting things that are on the way.

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Patty McGuire is a knitter who designs beginner knitting patterns. Video tutorials and online classes are currently in the works. She resides in the resort city of Virginia Beach where she has a small container garden and knits for her much loved Golden Retriever, Willie. She photographs and writes all the content on this blog (including this byline which seems weird because I’m writing about myself in 3rd person, but people like this sort of thing so I’m including it.)