m.o.M - mother of Michael

Nothing on my Needles!

Again! I keep getting caught up with my knitting...go figure.

Note though, that I have said "Nothing on my needles", not "Lots of FOs". On my work table are Orange Sweater, That Red Scarf, CandleFlame Shawl and the Long Paisley Shawl. All waiting to be blocked.

I made one, weak attempt at blocking That Red Scarf, but I'll have to do it again as the edges are still rolling, rolling, rolling...

I started (twice), the new Six Sox KAL pattern, but to no avail. Two trips to the frog pond and I'm out. For some reason, the pattern just wasn't doing it for me and although I absolutely love the yarn I chose for the project, it just wasn't enough for me to push through the pattern.

There will be plenty of opportunities to work on my intarsia skills in the future.

The yarn for my fair isle sweater waits patiently for the appropriate needles to arrive, as does the alpaca yarn for another sweater.

Everything is in a ready - set - go holding pattern for the Secret of the Stole KAL. I have the yarn, the needles, the beads and even the right sized crochet hook for beading, but no pattern yet.

So there you have it. This is what happens when the stars don't quite align for a knitter.

• Yarn and pattern - no needles
• Yarn, pattern and needles - pattern's just not  working for me
• Yarn and needles - no pattern

Every combination except needles and pattern, but no yarn. Actually that's not true. I have a whole bookshelf of patterns and buckets of needles and not the right yarn to create those  beauties.

So what's a girl to do? Sit idle? Clean house? No! and Hell No! are the respective answers to those questions! She digs for UFOs that predate not only her learning how to knit, but also her husband and both her children and starts to work.

Dear Santa, All I Want for Christmas is...

Hey, if Penney's, Walmart, K-mart and the others can put out their holiday decorations this early, I can for damn sure write my letter to Santa!

It's absurd that they start pushing this stuff in September now. September! Away go the "back to school" items, out flies the Halloween crap and alongside that, up go the fake Christmas trees.

I've been looking at the Halloween candy for the past couple of weeks and I can't help but wonder just how stale some of that will be once Halloween does get here. Oh yeah, none of that's made with real ingredients. It's all chemicals and processed crap.

And when did Halloween become a holiday that you have to decorate the house for? When I was a kid, there were no decorations. The candy was dumped into the big wooden salad bowl. That's it. That's all.

It's no wonder that we now have to clear off acre after acre of trees to build more of those U-Store-It facilities. We'd prefer to have blow-up witches and light-up plastic train sets for our front yards than trees and birds and wildlife.

Consume, consume and consume. That seems to be what we do best. Damn this just pisses me off! Like sheep being led to slaughter we are. They sell it, we buy it. No matter how tacky, tawdry or useless the item may be.

So, now that I have shown myself to be a woman of highly discerning taste and possessing great concern for our environment, let me get back to my letter to Santa.

Dear Santa,

I want, I need, I gotta have...a ball winder. Oh, and an umbrella swift. After a two-hour session last night of rolling 900 yards - 2700 feet - 1/2 mile of yarn into a ball, I decided that I cannot live without these two things.

Though it will hurt, I will suffer through the holidays without the blow-up witch and the light-up plastic train set without whining one teeny little bit if I can just have...a ball winder and an umbrella swift.

For your convenience, I have included the links to the appropriate distributor for these items as I know that the elves are very busy making toys for all the good little girls and boys whose parents are gross consumers of all the crap that is sold in the stores and has to later be stored in those stupid little sheds where someone is making money on the monthly rental fee because they don't have either the will power to not buy those things or have enough room in their homes to store all the junk they keep buying.....

Thank you,

Me

PS: Please tell Mrs. Claus hello for me.
PPS: I promise I'll leave out extra carrots for Rudolph this year.
PPSS: If you let me know what your favorite cookie is, I'll bake a whole batch just for you.