Here is the only knitting I can show you right now. It’s the knitting I do when I’m not knitting for other people. It’s a shawl called Flourish and it’s being made from Bluemoon Fiber Arts ‘Mopsy’ which is part bunny hair, as the name suggests!

It was started as another of those quick, instant gratification projects that I could work on in among all the more long-term projects I’m trying to finish. The problem is, the projects demanding my attention are all required in the next week.

When I say required, I don’t mean there’s a gun to my head about them. It’s more that the people I’m knitting for are all, at various stages, visiting in the next week or so and I can hand over their items to them in person. Always more satisfying than merely posting them, don’t you think?

And so I work away, cramming every spare moment with the frantic need to just finish stuff. Thankfully I start four weeks’ leave next Monday and I have a few spare days before people start arriving in town. I know I’ll get done all I need to do but I find a little buzz and sizzle about deadlines fuels the productivity nicely.

I’ve always said I’m a good deadline knitter. All I need is the knowledge that once the deadlines pass, I’m free to do some cruisey knitting for a while and that’s precisely what I’ll do in July. No Tour de France knit along, no Ravelympics (or Ravellenic Games as they’re now known, thanks the US Olympic Committee’s busy-bodying approach to the notion. (Nice run down on the ins and outs of that particular debacle over here.)

I got to chat on the radio the other day (local, Canberra ABC radio) about what was going on with the Ravelympics, which was funny given I’m not participating (because I’m travelling for a fair bit of July) and had only been reading around the edges of it all with bemusement.

I have to say it was great fun to just ramble for five or ten minutes about a corner of the internet which is loved by those of us who know it but, in my world at least, is not spoken about much outside a tiny circle of fellow knitters and my husband, who knows just how much time I spend on Ravelry. To say the words out loud to an unknowing audience was kind of thrilling. You know that electricity that runs through you when you get to talk furiously and passionately for a moment about something you love? That’s what I felt when I was invited to tell people listening to the radio what Ravelry is, why we love it and how great it is to be a knitter.

I could have kept going. I restrained myself. And right after me, Nettie got to do exactly the same thing and it was fabulous.

But for now, no more talking about knitting. Deadlines loom. Back to it.

Bells