Lovelihood

While we're on the subject of curling up under warm things, I thought I'd share with you this little work in progress, whose stitches were cast on the day after I found out I was pregnant. I waited that extra rotation of the earth only because the yarn store wasn't open on Mondays. Not knowing the gender of the baby, and really not one to bend to blue and pink stereotypes at any rate, I picked out what I felt to be gender-neutral yet modern nursery-cute colors. That was a long year and half ago. Now, the salmon and gray combination strikes me as somewhat Freddy Krueger-ish, but I persevere, if only to get one more project done and out of mind.

I don't want to make a habit out of trotting out the works in progress. Because, yeah, while the process is just as important as the product, projects that never see the light of completion are just big ol' crafty fail. And, yeah, I do have a back-of-the-closet-ful of semi-stitched/glued/worked/cut miscellany developing that mustyness that comes about from spending any amount of time scrunched up in a plastic bag and shoved into dark spaces. Even my unfinished digital projects somehow manage a hint of that odor. So this bit of knitting is getting the fast-track treatment, itching to be used as the baby blanket it was intended to be, while The Girlie is still a baby.

As was the hand-stitching and binding that completed the quilt, knitting is what I consider a TV activity. Not content to just curl up in my chair and absorb the drama of whatever Tivo has seen fit to entertain us with, I must constantly keep my hands afiddle with things like quilting, knitting, crossword puzzles (NY Times in pen, thank you very much) and, in an admittedly poor exercise of my multi-tasking muscle, reading. I could attribute this to something about idle hands and the devil, if I believed in such things as evil and archaic adages. It's all about being productive and efficient. And while I'm not out there producing a paycheck for the family coffers, I might as well be making something pretty and cozy while numbing my brain with the warm glow of pre-recorded goodness.

We've been watching as much Olympics as Tivo will allow (which is markedly less, here in Houston, without the access to Canadian networks that we had in Seattle), and for these few weeks have submitted our kid-free evening hours entirely over to the Games. The quilt, completed on the eve of the opening ceremonies, gave way to the soft and wooly fibers (superwash, of course) of this blanket worked on spindly circulars. I'll keep going until I run out of the yarn, whose dye lots have all surely been consumed in the intervening months since I purchased them. It won't be crazy-large, like a certain blanket I knitted The Boy four years ago. But it will require some augmentation, likely with fabric, to calm the intense edge curling and puckering that even a most stringent blocking will be unlikely to resolve.

It likely won't be done before the closing ceremonies five days from now. But good progress has been made. And we have three seasons of Mad Men to catch up on.