No More Deadlines

After months and months I finally have no more self-imposed deadlines for babies that need Christmas presents or Moms-to-be that need baby shower gifts, and no more Ravelympics deadlines or secret projects with secret deadlines.  For the moment, at least, I'm back to knitting what I want and starting random projects because I feel like it rather than because I "need" to make a gift or compete or knit-along.

I hold no ill will towards any of the projects that had deadlines (most of which I imposed on myself, after all), I'm just ready to relax the knitting a bit, so I'm trying to scale back on the mental deadlines I've been known to impose on myself.  Some people call them goals, but I find I sometimes take them too seriously to call them that and they stress me out if I don't finish "on time".  So back to lazy knitting I go, at least for a little while.

But I offer proof that this doesn't mean that I'm not getting any knitting done:

A little 8-inch sock yarn blanket square.  It was mostly mindless and fun to watch the colors mix and pool as it grew, but a bit of a challenge for me to determine when I was at the right size (I cast off too early, picked up some stitches and added the garter stitch border to make up for it.  Definitely not my finest example of knitting skill).  It also took a fair amount of knitting time given the US size 1 needles.  I can see why it's a popular way to use up the sock yarn remnants, but there won't be a ludistitcher sock yarn blanket anytime soon.

And of course there are other things in the works in various states, including my first project from yarn and patterns purchased at Stitches Midwest 2009:

I told Xandermommy I couldn't go spend more money at Stitches this year if I didn't even get around to knitting with my purchases from last year, so this is the start of a sweater.  I'm not imposing a deadline on it, but since Stitches Midwest is still months away I am hoping that I can make some decent progress on it before then.  Of course, this particular pattern requires making a lot of pieces and picking up hundreds of stitches and way too much seaming, so we'll see if I'm ripping my hair out by then anyway! 

(Yes, all of those yarn fumes at Stitches overwhelm reality and give you all sorts of ambitions and a warped sense of how many hours are in a day and how fast you can knit... or something...)