2014 Challenges

As usual, my challenges this year are fun, things I'm going to enjoy doing. I don't see the point in making new year's resolutions when they get set on the 1st of January and broken around the 4th.

Do you remember these little coloured balls that I posted about back in December? I told you that they were going to be used as part of my 2014 challenges, but I left you guessing what for.

Each year I keep meaning to join in with The Innocent Big Knit but so far, I've never got round to it. To join in, you have to knit little hats which are then sent to Innocent for them to put on Innocent bottles in November. Once sold, 25p from each bottle goes to Age UK to help vulnerable older people.

The hats need to be sent in by the beginning of October, and as I'd like to get fifty done to send in, my challenge is to knit one each week. There would still be a shortfall, so I've knit eleven already to start me off and get me on track.

So where do the little coloured balls come in? Well, take a look at the hat at the back of the photo below, the one which is knit in two different blues. This was the first one I knit. Just look at my rubbish attempt at making a pom pom. After that turned out so bad, I decided that I needed to rethink my idea and that's where these little coloured balls come in. I think the rest of the hats look much better.

My second challenge for 2014 came to me when I read Su's blog post, A List of Nice Things on her Living On The Edge blog. Su's post was about doing something nice for herself each month, and I thought this would be a nice challenge for me this year. What the nice things will be, I have no idea yet, but I intend to find twelve fun things. I suppose that most of them will be done with other people, but perhaps a couple may be things which I do on my own, we'll see.

A visit to the library is my third challenge. We're very lucky where I live, I know that so many libraries around the country have been under threat of closure, whereas my local library has recently been refurbished after the Big Lottery Fund awarded over £1m of funding to extend and refurbish it. It's now based on a green design which features the use of recycled materials and a variety of green technologies such as solar panels for heating water and a living sedum roof which is energy efficient and encourages wildlife. As we're so fortunate to have such a great resource in our area, it's important that we use it.

Back to my library challenge then. What I'd like to do is visit the library each month and choose a non fiction book to read. There's so many subjects I'd like to learn more about but never get round to, so this challenge should spur me on.

So that's my challenges set for 2014. They're all things I'm going to enjoy doing again so I shouldn't have any problem keeping up with them.

I hope everyone enjoyed their New Year's Eve celebrations. Another year's sped past, it's hard to believe that we're now in to 2014. Mick's back to work tomorrow, Daniel heads back to uni on Saturday and Eleanor's back to school on Monday. It's all over for another year.

Happy New Year.