Which would be kind of awesome. Hmmmm.
Despite printing off what there is so far of my manuscript and taking it home with me last Wednesday, I didn't get a lick of writing done all weekend. What I did manage to get done instead, thanks to its perfect-for-multitasking nature, was a crapload of knitting, so I'm still feeling nice and accomplishy. I'm very close to finishing the front side of my husband's Christmas sweater. I also started a Christmas scarf for my sister-in-law. But what's really making me feel accomplished is this:
It's an ear warmer (the pattern for which can be found in
Stitch 'N' Bitch Nation), and it's so pretty. It looks fairly complicated, but it's really a pretty quick and easy pattern to knit. The most time consuming part was the band itself (see below), which took about four hours, or two nights in front of the telly.
The flowers are knitted separately, and all four bits took me about two hours (and I knit slow):
I actually knitted all of the pieces week before last while I was home with the plague. This weekend I finally got around to blocking them, which took about a day of drying time, and sewing them on, which took another hour. And voila! Here's me modeling the finished project (in bad lighting and sans any makeup, so be warned):
It's very pretty in 3D, and I'm quite pleased with myself. It looks warm--if the temperature here ever drops below 60F I'll be able to test it. Actually, we have a cold front, complete with winter storms and possible snow, moving in later this week, supposedly. So last night I took the chunky red yarn that formed the flowers and started making this coordinating scarf:
It's priority one right now if I'm going to finish it in time for the weather to change, but come the cold I should look quite smashing (and be warm and toasty all wrapped up in cashmere).
Of course, my warm glow of accomplishment faded once I got back to the office this morning and saw how my workload managed to build even though supposedly nobody was here all weekend. Plus there was the realization that there is no way on God's green earth for me to make my own personal NaNo goal by the 30th, even though it was already considerably less than the official NaNo goal. That's not so bad, though, because I was able to stop stressing about the word count and spend a couple of hours this afternoon outlining the rest of the novel instead.
The month's not over yet, though, so I'm still going to try to get as close to my goal as possible, and between that momentum and having a roadmap for where to go next, I expect December to be a pretty productive month even without the NaNo deadline looming. Plus there's the Crapometer to look forward to. And hopefully now that Matt's in recovery mode, sickness will be banished from our household for a while and I'll be able to get some writing done on the weekends, too. I'm aiming to have a rough draft finished by the time we're ready to pack up and move, and as of now, it's looking good.
Meanwhile, I'm going to do my best to have a new chapter up before I leave work tomorrow. So if you're tuning in to the writing blog, you're safe not checking back before then.
Labels: knitting, NaNoWriMo, writing
