This month is disappearing out from beneath me. Perhaps that draft of my master’s thesis that I handed in this week has something to do with it… perhaps, perhaps. That would also explain the INSANE STARTITIS I am battling. I have piles of projects around, and yet I want to cast on a million more things.
The other cause of all this startitis are the impending holidays. Even Rockerfeller Center is starting to get ready:
so I am working like mad on Christmas knitting:
I can post these because they are the Grandfather Socks (hopefully they will help combat the chilly toes from poor circulation). Poppop’s level of technological use is the TV remote, so I have no fear he might somehow accidentally surf here and spoil the surprise. The rest of the family, however, are much more technologically literate, so those projects will all have to wait.
I can share this one, though, which I did tonight over three hours of procrastination brainstorming:
These are for my old boss from my college tutoring job. His folks live in the Midwest, and they lost their home in the flooding last spring. Their home…including all the Christmas ornaments. Harry wrote a note about it on Facebook, and talked about how his mom would retell the story of each ornament as she put it up every year, and I teared up right away, because my mom does the same thing. There’s lots of history tied up in those decorations and ornaments, and the idea of losing ours made my heart seize up for a minute. Harry asked if we could help him create a new collection for his Mom, new ornaments and new stories. So I found some appropriately-colored yarn scraps and made a little pair of stockings for Harry’s Mom’s tree, and I will write a little note to go with them, to tell her about how I used to knit in the Writing Center in between sessions. I hope it’s a new story.
I also think I’m knitting more of these little socks, because they’re adorable and fast. I used the Bitty Hat and Sock Ornament (socks only, obviously) from Interweave’s holiday pattern freebie, available from Knitting Daily, and just finished the socks off instead of doing the little toothpick-needle finish. It’s adorable, but it probably wouldn’t ship as well, and I have no Elmer’s around to make little yarn balls, and I really kind of like just a finished mini stocking. I think everyone’s getting one of these this year!
The arrival of the holiday season has all sorts of harbingers: digging out the holiday music (check), the Hershey’s Kiss bell commercial (omgcheckyay!), the arrival in stores of Stella D’Oro Pfeffernuesse (where is it already?) and me, starting to obsessively bake. Check, check, CHECK:
They were really good. What thesis?