Still alive, still knitting

...Still knitting a lot, actually!

Firstly, thanks loads to everyone who left blocking-quickly tips in the comments. Fortunately, the sample was nice and dry by the time I needed to send it out to the publisher without having to do much more than stomp on top of it with dry towels once or twice a day. So that deadline project was made relatively stress-free, and it and its co-deadline project arrived at the other end with several days to spare. Woohoo!

My third deadline project, that of my cousin's baby blanket, was made only by dint of giving up all sleep one night a few days before it had to be done. I probably wouldn't have had to do such a stupid thing if I hadn't completely effed up the edging chart the weekend before and basically wasted two whole days of work doing entirely the wrong thing, ripping back the entirely wrong thing, and recalcuating and rewriting instructions so that it would actually come out properly. But despite this, this finished product turned out beautifully and I was quite pleased. And apparently it was a big hit with the parents-to-be. Hooray! I will eventually be writing up the pattern (somewhat differently from the original, so that knitters everywhere who take it on don't want to KILL ME), but for now I'm letting that one simmer while I recover from it. :)

Deadline project number four sailed along without incident, but its co-deadline projects (numbers five and six) ran into the rather serious snag of yarn support arriving much later than originally expected. Fortunately, the editor took pity on me and, instead of expecting to knit everything within 24 hours (I like to give two weeks for shipping), gave me an extension, and I am happy to report that I finished up the knitting this weekend!

Yarn for deadline project number seven arrived this past week, and after finishing all the other deadline knitting, I started on it today, and it was coming along really nicely. Yes, was. About twelve rows into it, I realised that my gauge was off, so I've ripped it out and restarted with slightly smaller needles. Hopefully that will do the trick.

So there you have it, a whole lot of blogging about projects without telling you almost anything about what they actually are. :( Sorry about that. On the upside though, I'm going to be able to do a heck of a lot of reveals this summer!

There was, however, a period during all that deadline knitting where I was waiting for yarn to show up and had done everything I could possibly do until it arrived...so I knit on other stuff! I made good headway on my dad's Christmas present:

And I broke out the Opal Vincent van Gogh sock yarn that my husband gave me for our anniversary in February. Our LYS recently started carrying this stuff, and it's so cool. The concept is that each of the colourways in this yarn line are pulled from colours in various famous works of Vincent van Gogh. Happily, my husband chose my absolute favourite as my gift, "Starry Night". I have decided to be selfish and make socks out of it for me. He heartily approves of this decision. :) I can already tell that I am going to loooove these socks:

Lovelovelove.

I also got a teensy bit done on a third preemie hat at the last charity knit night of my local LYS, but nothing to shout about. I expect I'll be able to finish it off at this week's gathering.

Finally, DD1 has made it clear that she would really, really like it if I could knit her a "Hedwig" owl based on the "Errol" pattern from my Charmed Knits book. Her birthday's coming up, so guess what? Yeah. So that's next on my list.

Fun times!