I'm trying to be better at cataloguing my knits so here's a roundup list of new things I learned/knitted in 2025. Hopefully photo's will follow.
finished a celtic cable scarf for my boyfriend. i learned I love the look of cables but absolutely hate doing them.
finished a less complicated cable sweater for a friend. reaffirmed I hate knitting cables but it led me to learn knitting them without a cable needle. doing a purl stitch with the needle at the back of the work felt like a great victory. I figured it out myself too, after hearing from a knitting vlogger they did a workshop on doing cables without a cable needle. made an annoying thing more efficient.
colourwork brioche! did a simple two colour scarf (yellow and teal, some Rowan tweed wool yarn) to learn this technique. somehow for one colour the stitches ended up looking smaller then the other colour on the other side. something to do with tension and the dominant yarn but I'm not quite grasping it yet.
knitted my first full garment that's still in the 'needs finishing' bin: the irena waistcoat by vert-and-rose which is a bouclé vest with mattress stitch finishings on the hems. the mattress stitch is killing me I did the arm holes and they're so uneven. 😭 tips on keeping tension here are greatly appreciated.
I finished a fisherman's rib cobalt blue scarf which made me realize that scarves (definitely fisherman's rib but also the cable ones) eat up a lot of wool and are nice projects to work on in between others but if they are my main project I will just not knit on them from the halfway point. then they bore me.
my first triangle shawl knitted top down (meaning you're starting from the straight, broad side and you're knitting toward the point at the bottom by increasing both at the sides and in the middle. this was a free pattern called Mike by the mouse army knitting co. this was so fascinating to me as I could only see the finished object properly when it was off the needles, as I was knitting it on circulars that were shorter than the final length/wingspan of the shawl.
started a self drafted pullover vest where I probably made the armholes too big, so I can mull over choosing specific hem styles to make them look a bit more balanced again.
I knitted with mostly DK weight, in different types of yarn, some more stretchy and some less, I realized I like knitting with alpaca as it has less stretch. I tend to knit either too loose or too tight because of impaired small range motor control and stretchy yarns are harder for me to handle. the resulting knitted fabric from the alpaca is not my fave though. I think the tweedy sheep's wool yarns are my fave in between.
honorable mention: frogging my salty days sweater because I chose the wrong size, I don't have enough yarn for the bigger size and the yarn I used isn't available anymore I think. even if it were, I chose a super itchy mohair to go with it so I'd have to buy a whole lot of new yarn anyway, the colour combo didn't work out as well as I'd hoped so I'm just gonna see what I can use from my stash for this sweater as it is still one of my favourite patterns to come out in the past years.