In 1974 Elizabeth Zimmermann released her Knitter’s Almanac.
She had already established herself as an influential voice in American knitting with her first book, Knitting Without Tears. In it she encouraged knitters to get creative with their knitting.
Through her humorous writing she quickly became America’s grandma; offering cheeky advice and helpful knitting tips.
The Almanac was her way of guiding enthusiastic knitters through a year of projects. Each pattern was chosen to be seasonally appropriate as the year progressed. The genius of her book was not only the entertaining anecdotes, but the timing of the projects.
Rather than have you knit a pair of mittens in January when they are needed most, you knit them in summer when there is plenty of time to finish.
Today we’re looking at planning a year of knitting so you can have the most productive 2024 ever!
Planning a Year of Knitting
Last year I came across a video with Jesse Itzler. He’s an entrepreneur who seems to have the whole work / life balance thing figured out.
He also does a lot of cool stuff, like biking across the US, running crazy ultra marathon races, and living with a NAVY SEAL for a month.
His secret is to do ONE life defining thing every year; write a book, run a big race, start a business, etc.
That got me thinking how can we apply some of his advice to knitting.
It’s not practical to plan out everything we are going to make throughout the year. I’m sure there are some people who can do that, but I’m certain that plan will end up changing at some point.
1 BIG project, 6 NEW patterns
Itzler uses his big calendar to plan 7 projects for the year.
One is the life defining event mentioned earlier. The other 6 are mini-adventures taken once every 8 weeks.
We can translate this to our knitting like this:
1 BIG project
This could be knitting your first sweater, knitting 100 hats for charity, making a temperature blanket, or knitting every sock pattern in the book below.
If you’re into heirloom lace knitting, make an Shetland lace shawl.
And if you want to knit all your Christmas gifts this year, do that.
The main idea is to have ONE thing you can look back at in 2025 and say “This is what I’m most proud of knitting this year.”
6 NEW patterns
Every couple months, try a new pattern. Ideally this is something type of knitting you’ve never tried before.
Make them short weekend or were long projects.
If you want to learn 2-Color Brioche, make a cowl.
If you’ve never knit a toy before, try it.
You can even jump on the Korean nose scarf trend.
If you did this every year for the next 10 years that’s 10 epic knitting projects and 60 new projects you’ve tried.
The key is to list out what those projects might be and then block out time on the calendar to work on them.
But if you need some inspiration for a big project check out the books below.
Conclusion
I hope these books have offered some inspiration.
But what do you think?
Are you going to try making a BIG project this year? If so what?
Or maybe you’ll put some new pattern to explore on the calendar?