Last December my Son and I were chatting and we decided that in ’08 we would like to take a cruise for Christmas. Well cruises ain’t cheap and I’m a single Mom. In order to accomplish this we were going to have to do some serious planning and saving. How could we pull this off? In order to have enough money to pay for the trip and buy Christmas gifts?
First, and foremost I established a Christmas Savings account at my companies local credit union. One step down. That helped garner us at least a little interest on what we saved. I already knew that I wanted to make knitted gifts for my closest friends but good yarn is not cheap and good knitting takes time. While at the local Barnes & Noble one night I stumbled across a book about destressing your life it mentioned that major holidays and birthdays are often a very stressful time for most folks because they wait until the last minute to buy everything. The idea was that instead of waiting until the last minute to start planning in January. First to make up a list of friends and relatives that you wanted to buy for. This is the January goal just to make up your list. Then to divide them evenly by each month and to buy that many gifts each month. Thereby allowing you to budget more easily and buy most gifts well in advance. So for example lets say your list came to 11 you would buy one gift each month for one person. One in February, one in March, and so on.
Thus an idea was born!! I decided to split up the folks that I wanted to knit a gift for and the folks I wanted to just buy for. So in January I made up my lists picked out a yarn and commenced. There were six folks I wanted to make a gift for so I bought one yarn each month for the first six months then knitted just one sock each month for the first six months and then did the second sock in the last six months. This way I could make my gifts and not have to worry about second sockitis, the money, and the time. The fabulous news is IT IS WORKING!!!! It has been hard to stick with the plan at times but it’s August and I am well ahead of schedule!! I am pleased to present:
January & July
Whitby
February and August
Chunky Monkey
March and September
Thuja
April
Beaded Rib
May
Mini Cable
June
Chevron Sock
It has definitely taken a lot of work to pull this off so far but keep your fingers crossed for me hopefully I will pull this all off! Only three socks left to go….
