Pride goeth before the fall

I only have myself to blame. But that doesn't make me any less exhausted.

I prided myself on minimizing the amount of Christmas knitting I had planned. While all my knitterly friends were frantically finishing mitts, hats and socks, I thought I was finished.

Then, last week I remembered about the dreaded 'teachers gift'. Being the 42nd person to hand over a "Number 1 Teacher" mug wasn't the best idea, not if I didn't want my kid to fail JK. So, when I heard my daughter's teacher, Mrs. H, talking about how her hands were so small she usually bought kid sized gloves, I was struck by inspiration. Fetching was the answer! Short, sweet, beautiful and practical. And fast. Did I mention fast?

I picked out a skein (color: North Sea) of one of my all-time favorite yarns, Alpaca with a Twist, Highlander, and went to work. The Highlander, which is a blend of alpaca, wool and microfiber, is so exquisitely soft that the finished objective is almost secondary to just feeling the Highlander slip through your fingers as you knit.

All but the 2nd thumb was finished by Monday. Ha! Take that Christmas Knitting!

Remember all that pride go-ething before the fall? Yesterday I remember the teacher's assistant in the class. Drat! I needed a second pair of Fetchings. After some misadventure finishing up the 2nd glove yesterday (cabled in the wrong direction, frogged, reknit, forgot the thumb hole, frogged, reknit), I cast on for a second pair of gloves in Blackthorne. I think the ladies at my Thursday night Sit 'n Knit were actually placing bets on whether I'd finish them in time.

Cast on: 7 pm.
Each glove: takes a tad over 2 hours.
Last school day starts: 9 a.m.

Staying up till 3 a.m. to finish Christmas knitting for teachers: priceless and exhausting.

Excuse me. I need to go take a nap...


PS. No, I didn't even get a chance to take a picture, but they look like this other pair I made last winter.

Chicken or the egg?

You never think it’s going to happen to you. Sure, other people maybe. But you’re organized. You’ve got a system. You don’t have a problem; you have it all under control.

And then it happens. You lose a WIP (work in progress). Well, not you. Me. I’ve been on a bit of a sock bender lately. There’s the socks I was inspired to design after picking up some exquisite deep purple Handmaiden Casbah sock yarn. And its mate that I test knitted in a spring-like shade of green. A week or so ago I was bored and needed a simple project for the waiting room of my doctor’s office. So I started a Zauberball sock. Not 2 days ago, a colorful ball of Opal Zwerger Garn caught my eye, causing me to wonder how it would knit up.

But as I ripped skeins of yarn out of their shelves last night, I was searching for none other than the delightfully soft, appropriately blue-green flecked Diamond Luxury sock yarn (in color Nile) I’d shaped into one half of Cookie A.’s Pomatomus. No one I’ve met can pronounce the word, which is the genus of the blue fish. So in Ravelry, I called these my Hippotamus socks – close enough and much easier to pronounce.

Did I lose my Hippos because I have too many WIPs? Or do I have too many WIPs because my stash is too big? Chicken or the egg?

So now, I’m searching for my Hippopotamus. The first artist’s rendering produced looked like this:

 

I sent her back to the drawing board, where she produced this:

Sigh. I can only imagine that my Hippopotamus is lurking somewhere, barely visible within the warm, wooly confines of my oversized stash. Kinda like this:

 

Having a nap perhaps?

 

I just hope that there hasn’t been some “life-on-the-Savannah, survival-of-the-fittest” fight to the death happening in my stash.

 

Who do you think would win? The Hippopotamus or the Malabrigo? Maybe that ball of eyelash yarn hiding in the bottom draw – I never can seem to get rid of that stuff.