Scrapbook for January

I've finally managed to put together the scrapbook pages for the first month of  My Year in Yarn. It might look simple but this took me ages. I couldn't work out how to arrange it all, what fonts to use, what to back the printouts with ... oh yes, and my ink cartridges ran out.

Things started to look up when I found these scrapbooking and origami papers in The Works.

I thought I could use the bigger sheets for big chunks of text and the origami paper for titles and other bits and bobs. And you can never have too much origami paper anyway.

Paper Kawaii's Origami Star

 Here's the first page with a key to the yarn block.

I rather like the look of the black photo corners, even if they did keep sticking to my clothes as I was fitting them to the papers. I was tempted to add lots of stickers and other pretty stuff but I thought that would make the whole thing much more time consuming and set a precedent for the rest of the year. I can always go back and add them later if the fancy takes me.

On the second page I've been a bit daring and added an origami model of an envelope box. This was the inspiration for my Pocket Box pattern which I published a few days ago.

Maybe this will entertain my future hypothetical grandchildren when they're forced, yet again, to look through their Grandmother's boring yarn scrapbook. The paper box opens by pulling the triangle flaps apart and it took me ages to think of a way to replicate this in knitting. Eventually I decided on stocking stitch rolls which hold the top together.

I'm not including pictures of everything I work on - the early stages of many projects aren't particularly photogenic - but I will try to put in a photo of anything that gets finished each month. The only thing I actually finished in January was my Old-Fashioned Tea Cosy, although I did add a picture of my Mini Marshmallow crochet to fill up the last page.

One of the advantages of keeping track of everything I work on like this is that it makes me get on with things that have been languishing for a while. This crochet is a good example. I needed more yarn and hadn't got round to ordering it and, to be honest, I was a bit daunted by how much I still had to do on this one. After writing about it here, I got on and ordered the yarn from Wool Warehouse who, as is their wont, delivered it in next to no time. Since then I've been powering away and mini marshmallow stitches are flying off my hook. The blanket is now nearly square so, if I can keep going like this, it might even be finished one day.

And now that March is here I can start putting together February's block ...