2025 in Review: A Finish Parade

I'll be posting my Annual Airing of the WIP™ pile here in a few days, but I thought I might take a moment first to share some of my finishes from 2025.  Maybe that will make us all feel better about the length of the list I'm about to drop on y'all. 

Let's start with some quick numbers.

• I completed 26 projects and used 15,485 yards of yarn.
• Of those 26, 16 were pairs of socks.  We do like a sock around these parts.
• I knit or crocheted 3 shawls and 1 poncho.
• I finished 1 substantial blanket project.
• I knit 3 pairs of fingerless mitts as Christmas gifts.
• I knit 2 stuffies: an Emotional Support Chicken and a gnome.

That feels like a healthy mix of projects (er, if you call 60% socks healthy...and I do).  Notably, there were no finished garments.  I have Riptide nearly done, but I am struggling with maintaining any momentum there. But we'll talk about that when we look at WIPs later.

Want to see some pictures?  Of course you do.

You saw the first whack of socks earlier when I was taking stock of my goal completion back in November, but here's the entirety of my 2025 output in one place:

There's a nice balance of vanilla, textured, and fun cables. Most have a Fish Lips Kiss heel, with the odd Fleegle or two in the mix for variety.  Will I finish more pairs in 2026 than I did in 2025?  Time will tell, but I can share that I'm already done one pair and expect another finish by end of week, so...

The shawl and poncho category is nicely balanced between knit and crochet. There's also good variety in size and weight (and color!)  I definitely didn't get bored making these.  (I lie.  The border on that Stephen West shawl nearly killed me.)

The blanket I finished is another Marion Mitchell - this was one is the Beachwalk Blanket.  I love it.  The colors are gorgeous, and it is a great size.  Those little 1 round grannies were a lot, but worth it, I think.

Some holiday mitts - all DK weight (or, well, the bottom pair is fingering held double, but same difference).

And then finally the stuffies.  I haven't made a ton of these kinds of projects in the past, but I got a big kick out of both of these, so there may be more in my future.

So that's a wrap on what I accomplished last year.  I am really happy with what I got done.

Looking ahead, there will for sure be more socks, likely another shawl or two, and hopefully some sweaters or sweater vests.  And given the number of blankets I'm working on, surely I will finish one of those someday too.

I hope.

Things Fall Apart, the Center Cannot Hold: On Entropy and Mending

One can only assume that when WB Yeats wrote the poem The Second Coming in 1919 he was rather more focused on the recently ended Great War, his pregnant wife nearly dying from the 1918-19 influenza pandemic, and the Irish Rebellion, but it applies to my afghan too.

I’ve been on a multi-year afghan bender, and why I decided that making blankets was my thing, I’m not entirely sure, but with multiple (ten *cough*, ten) current blanket WIPs this obsession shows no signs of abating.  I am particularly fond of the granny square, which begins in the center and grows outward.  Those familiar with crochet will likely be aware of the “magic circle” which is a nifty trick that allows you to start in the center of a motif without joining a circle of chains.

Upside?  It’s easy and tightens up like a dream, leaving no pesky hole in the middle.  Downside?  If you don’t take great pains to secure the end, that neatly tightened circle is gonna open right back up again.

 

The center literally did not hold.

But back to Yeats.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

In Yeats’ cosmology, history plays out as a series of epochs or “gyres.”  The widening gyre is the current era of modern civilization that is spiraling out into chaos.  The rest of the poem describes a vision of the future that subverts the imagery of the ‘second coming’ from the arrival of a heroic savior to the coming of a dark beast,  “suggesting that civilization’s sense of progress and order is only an illusion.”   

If we’re being honest, I’m rather less interested in the religious imagery in the second half of the poem than I am in the implications for the 2nd law of thermodynamics in the first.  Physics tells us that the universe began in a state of order with low entropy, and that things have been going down-hill ever since.  The ever-expanding, ever-accelerating universe craves disorder and “mere anarchy … loosed upon the world.”   Entropy will always, inevitably, increase over time, afghans will wear out (you were wondering if I was going to bring it back around, weren’t you?) and ultimately disorder and chaos will be victorious.

And yet. 

According to astrophysicist Adam Frank, “the very act of trying is what defines being alive.”  I heard this NPR interview when it originally aired back in 2013, and it stuck with me (and bless NPR’s archives for making it easy to find.)  Frank goes on to say, “even more, it's that act of trying that makes life - your life, in particular - a cosmic victory. Life, you see, is the triumph of order over chaos. Life is order hammered out if only for a time. And with that effort, something new, something wonderful appears in the universe: creativity.”

In some ways Yeats was absolutely right.  The center cannot (and did not) hold.  Things will fall apart.  Spend a few minutes perusing the day's headlines and you’ll see anarchy loosed all over the place.  On the other hand, what’s our responsibility to push back against the inevitable chaos?

Things fall apart, and then we fix them until we cannot fix them anymore.  If, as Jonathan Larson penned in Rent, “the opposite of war isn’t peace, it’s creation”, then the opposite of despair is mending. 

It is a radical act of defiance to continually reinvest energy into a decaying system.   The center will not hold; things will fall apart. But then we will put them back together.

Note: I wrote the initial draft of this back in the summer of 2024, and damned if it isn't more relevant now than it was even then.  Also, you'll be pleased to know I finally fixed the hole in my afghan. 

References:

Essay on W.B. Yeats' poem, The Second Coming.

NPR's "Don't Try to Clean That Messy Desk," interview with Adam Frank.