first

Hello lovely blog, lovely blog readers and lovely blog friends.

It's new years' day. It's a warm, overcast Friday afternoon. My whole family are out, I've done everything that I absolutely had to do and now I'm sitting here on the little couch in my bedroom thinking about where I've come from, where I am now and where I hope to go in this brand new year.

It's so rare that my world is quiet enough and still enough to follow thoughts all the way through these days and already I've found half a dozen ways to distract myself from writing this post, but here I am. Alone and with the time to do this thing that I really want to do yet am struggling to do.

I've always said that the more you blog - the better you blog, and now that I've blogged so little for so long, I don't trust my words and feel uncomfortable in their lack of flow. But this feels important to me and so I will persevere.

I have no idea if people read blogs anymore. I have no idea if people will read this blog anymore but I do know that this blog is important to me and that I really need to keep it going. The feeling of accomplishment and happiness I get when I put together and publish a post, the joy the interactions with the community bring me, the sweet feelings of nostalgia that scrolling back through old blogs invokes and the sense of how important prioritising something that isn't farm or family related really is.

So to start off with a bang, the same way I did last year, my plan is to blog every single day this January and hopefully regularly from there.

January is bound to be a very busy month on our farm and in our family, but I'm going to try my hardest to snatch a precious chunk of time each day to take some photos and write some words here. I'm thinking about craft posts, gardening and farming posts, some stuff about the girls, maybe some blogs about parts of our trip I never posted here, hopefully some book reviews, some cooking and any other random bits and pieces that pop into my mind.

As well as blogging more regularly, this year I'd love to buy a flock of sheep for land management and wool, I'd love to play with natural dyes, I'd love to work hard to find balance between work and play, I'd love to design a piece of knitwear, I'd love to work on being kinder to myself in my head, I'd love to find ways to get more involved with the causes that make me cry, I'd love to knit a Lopi Icelandic sweater, I'd love to unfollow a few people on social media who are not kind, I'd love to find some new recipes to add to our tired collection, I'd love to play with some botanical embroidery, I'd love to teach, I'd love to reacquaint myself with my sewing machine and sew some garments and I'd love to find a way to do a bit of housework regularly rather than leaving it until it's overwhelming. I'm sure there's more but that's a start.

Ok, the pile of cucumbers on the kitchen bench aren't going to pickle themselves....

I guess I'll see you tomorrow, and in the meantime if by chance you are out there reading along I'd love it if you'd say hi, maybe where you are from, if you have a blog what's it about or maybe a suggestion for something you'd like me to write about.

Until then, wishing you a wonderful and sweet 2016.

Lots of love,

Kate

xoxo

PS The first thing I wrote on the first day of last year is here. And I'm proud to say that although I'm still working on some of the things I hoped to achieve then, I did knit that cabled fisherman's jumper.