Some Projects Are Like That

They haunt your sleep. Creep into the unguarded corners of your consciousness. Hang over your head like Damocles' Sword and weigh down your neck like the Ancient Mariner's Albatross. Suck the joy right out of the project your working on, since you're not working on them. They are the knitting promises. The ones you made when you were full of hope and enthusiasm. Specifically, the ones I promised to someone else (I can always get out of promises I make to myself).

The winner of the longest runner? The pink Victoria Fingerless Mitts from Louisa Harding's Knitting Little Luxuries. Debuting here on 12/10/08, they disappeared on 12/26/08, not to reappear until almost a year later. Not a happy day Chez WoolGathering.

Curiously, the same day the mitts disappeared, these made their first appearance. These are the Golightly Gloves from Mason-Dixon Knitting Outside the Lines.

I managed to take a bit of humorous, one might even say quirky, knitting and turn it into possibly the single-most obnoxious gift I've ever given. I'm not sure this is something to be proud of. It was adding that fuchsia stripe there that did it. Factor in that the gloves themselves are significantly longer than the (no longer available) Williams Sonoma gloves Kay used in The Book and I'm not even convinced I created a usable bit of quirky knitting.

It's some type of irony that the two most long-outstanding Christmas projects have no finished item photograph. That doesn't change the fact that now they're done. Bestowed. Out of the house and off my mind. All subsequent knitting can be done with a clear and untroubled conscience. I am free. Almost, I feel like Scrooge on Christmas morning after the ghosts are gone.

"Why were you beating your head against that wall?"

"It felt so good when I stopped."

(Is it just me, or did anyone else notice that both projects were pink and both involved hands. In more than the making, I mean. I may need to eschew all projects that intersect those two categories from now on.)