I Love Finishing Things!

I love finishing things! I don't mean that the way some of you might-- those of you with a keen sense of detail and an ability to, pardon the pun, seamlessly do seams and zippers on more complicated garments. I just mean, I like getting stuff done and crossed off the project list. There's the sense of accomplishment and also the promise of getting to start a new project.

This past week, I spent several days on Galveston Island. There, I finished a simple but lovely K2P2 black scarf in Manos. Above, Melvin the Cat models it and below, my friend Jay models it. I made the scarf for my son, Henry, for his upcoming 22nd birthday. It's his first birthday that we'll not be spending together-- he moved to NYC. I hope the scarf is a reasonable substitute for my warm, wooly love for him.

While I was in Galveston, I also finished a book I've been working on which is, in large part, about a trip I took to Monhegan Island in 2011. It felt good and poetic to finish the book on an island since so much of the story takes place on an island. Down below you'll see an image of the front cover. The book will be out next week-- I'm publishing it myself after having my six previous books published more traditionally. I have to say that any trepidation I had about self-publishing has disappeared. I'm getting as much satisfaction with this hands-on approach as I get from knitting my own garments.

I also finished up the very silly hat you see below. That's supposed to be the Reddit Robot. My friend and webmaster is really into Reddit and he asked if I might make him a hat reflecting this love. I actually wound up making two-- the first was too short. This hat was a pretty big challenge for me. I sort of made it up as I went along. I did chart it out a bit on graph paper, but I had to play around with the math and ultimately some winging it occurred. I used a mashup combo of intarsia and Fair Isle and, as you can probably see, my tension wasn't spectacular. But hey, I learned a lot along the way and my friend loves his hat.

And just down below, pictured before I blocked it, is my Pi Shawl, which just thrilled me to finish. You know, I don't even wear shawls-- ha! But the process was amazing for me. I'm going to go ahead and say that 2012 was a super learning year for me as I tackled lace and the aforementioned intarsia and Fair Isle. (Actually, I picked up intarsia from Lisa on my first Monhegan retreat.)

And finally... The latest Interweave  KNITS came out recently and I'm happy to say that I've got a story in there. I had the pleasure of interviewing Kristen TenDyke, whose got a great new book out. So please, check out the interview. That was fun to finish, too, like knocking out a last-minute gift-- I had about four days to do the entire article, from phone interview to final copy. I'm better with writing deadlines than knitting deadlines, so it worked out okay.

Happy December, y'all. Stay Warm!