Chilling Out

As you can tell by my previous posts, the last few days haven't been so great for me. I've made a conscious decision to Chill Out. It's just April. I know this by now. April doesn't love me, and I'm not too fond of her, either. (Previous April disasters- lost a job, totaled a car, had surgery that led to a major health crisis. If it happens to me, and it's life-alteringly bad, it happens in April.)

The apartment is dry, at least for the moment. Hopefully for good. It still smells like Juicy Fruit, now with an overlay of floral yuck (maintenance was in again yesterday afternoon), but it's dry. And the cat has calmed down and started demanding food again. So I'm going to try to let it go. Tomorrow is May! Whoopie!

I'm part of a stash busting group on Ravelry (which you can see from previous posts I really need), and the May challenge is to knit with cotton. Being me, I spent all of April in an obsessive compulsive cotton dishcloth frenzy, so I'm ready to move on to something else. Instead, I have decided to declare May Acrylic Month. That's right, I'm going to take a crack at knitting up the piles and piles of Caron (and a little bit of Red Heart, I'm ashamed to say) that I've acquired in the last year or so. I have a blanket for Project Linus on the needles, which I plan to finish. I have a head scarf for a friend that I want to make. I promised a couple of Jayne hats for auction at the Houston Can't Stop the Serenity event in July. (I further promise to follow an actual pattern and not try to invent it on the fly as I did last time. Whoops!) I also want to make a few hats either for local homeless shelters or to send up to my parents' church in Boston for their program. Houston may not get as cold as New England, but I'm sure there are still plenty of people who could use a warm hat in January. I'm also knocking around the idea of making a Pretty Punk blanket (http://www.therunningyarn.com/2008/04/pretty-punk-blanket-free-pattern.html) in non-pretty, macho-manly colors for a friend who dearly loves all things skeleton and death metal related. The good news is that I may very well have all the yarn I need for that blanket already in my stash! I'd also like to make a baby hat from the December (?) issue of Creative Knitting.

And I'm recommitting myself to No Yarn Purchases for the month of May. Everybody's got to have a goal.

Let's see... that's at least seven projects, maybe more, and two of them are blankets. It won't all get finished, but I should burn through a few skeins in the stash. Woo hoo!