Christmas

I am knitting for Christmas.

I have done the usual thing of queuing up enough projects to keep me going for about six months, then planning to make them all in four weeks.  During that time, I also plan to make soaps, Christmas cards, biscuits, two Christmas cakes, an advent calendar, labels for all the knitting, and a patchwork quilt.

I also plan to keep my job, move house and sleep.

I am, as always, insane.

I convinced myself it could be done by casting on five projects at once, ordering 9 balls of yarn, catching a cold and screwing up the gauge on one of the projects.  When in doubt, apparently the best thing to do is be outrageously optimistic.  So far, I am not panicking, and am taking a lot of comfort out of looking at the bin full of projects that just need sewing together or having the ends woven in.  I am pretending I haven't packed up most of my sewing stuff and that I can totally get to the sewing machine around all the boxes of stuff.  I am watching the craft channel 24/7 in the hope that I'll absorb some of the craftiness and magically do even more than is humanly possible.

This should be fun.

The art of Not Knitting

Ugh, I haven't knitted anything in ages.  Ages, I tell you!  Super Scary exam is in 3 weeks and I am studying like a thing possessed.  This means I really haven't had an opportunity to knit, because I know that if I start, I WILL. NOT. STOP.  Possibly ever.  And that would mean failing the exam and, by extension, hating myself (not to mention having to go through yet another 6 weeks of studying hell), so I've had to swallow my urge to knit and instead spend hours with my head in technology books, slowly losing the will to exist.
Of course, tomorrow is the knitting show.  And I am going, because I need a day off from studying.  And this means I am going to spend 5 hours surrounded by crafting materials, armed with cash and a crazed feeling of freedom.  And a shopping list.  (I refuse to do what I did last year -namely, run riot with £50 and buy whatever the hell caught my eye, including cross stitch kits and some stickers)  How am I going to keep myself on the straight and narrow next week, with all that new yarn sitting patiently in my house, and all the new project ideas in a nice list on the coffee table?!  HOW?  It's going to kill me.  Kill me, I tell you.

In happier news, BFF and I have organised a long weekend holiday in Cornwall in November.  This basically is code for A Knitting Party.  We're going to have 5 hours of train journey in either direction, and then sit around for 4 days watching DVDs and eating.  The amount of crafting time is going to be ASTRONOMICAL.  It's a couple of weeks after I finish (and hopefully pass) the exam, which means I will be in full-on Christmas Knitting mode, so I will be using it as an opportunity to get through as many projects as is humanely possible; because I do not want to spend the last week before Christmas knitting until 3am, having come home from the pub totally drunk.  Bad Things always happen as a result of this sort of poor planning.  Let's face facts: Not Knitting is basically a staple of the week before Christmas, because you're too busy giving the finished presents away, buying food and planning how to spend the actual Christmas break.  There is no time to be finishing projects, unless you want to go mad.

Going on this trip also means I can work on knitting something for the boyfriend without him accidentally showing up at my house when I'm halfway through making it.  (The matter of the BFF's present is a separate issue which I am already going crazy trying to figure out.  Maybe I'll leave it at the boyfriend's house!)

So in conclusion, the Knitting Trip is a well-timed way of blitzing as much of the work as is humanely possible, whilst getting properly into the Christmas spirit with enough food to feed a small army.  And if I am awake all night on the Friday, well, I'll have 3 more days to recover - which is much better than having to get up at the crack of dawn to deliver the present you only just finished knitting and never want to see again as long as you live.

And now, I must off; back to the exciting videos, the copious amounts of notes and the horror of learning binary.  Yep.

Yarn-related fails

I finished the first sock with about 40cm of yarn left in ball 1.  OMFG, the last 10 rows were terrifying.  I kept banging on about how badly things were going until my other half found himself on Yarn Watch, staring at the teeny tiny pile of yarn getting teenier and tinier with every stitch I made.  I finished it and am now on sock 2, and it suddenly occurred to me that if I happened to make the adult sock I used most of this ball for every so slightly bigger than the adult sock I used with the first ball, then I may run out of yarn earlier this time.  So now I'm on Yarn Watch, round 2, even though I'm on 25 rows in. This is not a fun way to knit, I can tell you.

I also started my heavily improvised Christmas Projects, which involve taking a worsted-weight, knitted-flat, felted project, and making it a DK-held-double, in-the-round, ribbed project with my own variation of the chart.  This is, naturally, a recipe for disaster and I've already started having nightmares about it even though I am literally on the second row.  I've also realised that I made a tactical error at the weekend when I 'accidentally' went to the LYS and bought some Big Softie to make a hat; I need more of the yarn for the Christmas projects, and it's the only shop I know of in London that stocks the stuff.  I am 6 rows away from needing it in a colour I don't have, the shop opens and closes whilst I'm on my way to or on the way home from work, and I therefore have to wait until the weekend to go back.  So now I'm annoyed at myself about this too.  Buying yarn, apparently, is an art.

On a happier note, the Knitting And Stitching Show tickets have now gone on sale.  I AM SO EXCITED, I MAY VOMIT.  I am going to go with a shopping list for Christmas stuff.  I am only going to buy the stuff I need.  I am not going to go mental at the Brown Sheep Company and accidentally buy a bag of baby cashmere because it was cheap.  I promise.

Sleigh bells ring, are you listening?

During a mad startitis binge last weekend, I spontaneously decided to make a list of all the Christmas projects I'd been vaguely planning in my head for this year, thinking I could put together a shopping list and have everything ready to start making stuff in November.  I was horrified to find that my list contained no less than 15 items, and there are only 15 weeks until Christmas day.  I'm a slow, English-style knitter, so most small-ish projects take me a week.  This news has therefore thrown me into some sort of knitting inferno where I'm trying to buy materials and knit five things at once - all whilst studying for an exam I'm taking in two weeks!  PANIC PANIC PANIC.

In my haste I have, naturally, made a mistake already.  The kiddy socks I oh-so-cleverly planned to make with some leftover yarn turned out to be rather larger than I had anticipated, and of COURSE I didn't have enough yarn.  Or anything else of the right weight.  So yesterday I found myself breaking my self-imposed yarn shopping ban to try and track down some solid coloured Regia Stretch - which of course has turned out to be like gold dust.  WTF?  The woman in Liberty's tells me they stopped selling it because nobody every bought it, which I find odd because I love the stuff!  WOE IS ME.  I ended up buying some cotton 4-ply instead which seems to do the job just fine, but still, I was already frogging the whole sock in my head, which is not a fun way to spend a lunch time yarn shopping spree, I can tell you.

It looks like I still don't have enough yarn anyway; the idea was to use the extra stuff for the heels and toe, but I am unconvinced that the leftovers will be enough to do the feet as well as the cuffs.  I really suck at this sort of thing.  Does anyone know a foolproof way of weighing yarn and deducing how much yardage you've got left, if you know all of its vital statistics?  This would really stop me from repeatedly getting into this situation ;-)

So anyway, the point is that I thought I was being all organised and avoiding having another one of those Decembers where I find myself stumbling home drunk at 1 in the morning, downing a pint of water and knitting until the sun comes up, then going to work, downing coffee, going back to the pub and repeating the cycle until I collapse; instead I find myself panic-buying yarn and trying to work out if it's humanly possible to knit whilst in the shower.  Oh well, perhaps I'll suddenly become a speed knitter as a result of all the haste, and everything will be finished by Bonfire Night!