Life With Matty (and other stories): In which I Lose My Mind and Start a Ridiculous Number of Projects

I'm having one of those months when everything seems like a good idea to me.

Mostly the problem has involved excess knitting, which would explain why my project list is overrun with things like this

Swallowtail shawl in the making.
Some other people started knitting this, so I did too.
They are all done now. Me, not so much.

and this

Some sort of Estonian Shawl thingy. The entire shawl
will look like this, which is why some of the more v
aried projects have bumped it out of its place in my must-knit list.

and this:

Bridgewater. Starts with a very large garter stitch square, worked from
point to point. When you finish that, you still have to
add the edging, which is also pretty large.

That would, if you are inclined to count, be three shawls. That might seem like a lot for a person who wears no shawls. But they seemed kind of cool, so I thought I would make them. Or at least start them, because I don't seem to get too far before something else seems like an even better idea.

Like this sweater. Or hem, really, because I haven't gotten beyond the bottom edge, even if it is my newest love.

Sullivan, designed by a woman in my knitting guild. How cool is that?

It's miles ahead of this, which is the very, very beginning of a sleeve for a sweater that I couldn't wait to start in the spring.

Serape Jacket. By the third color change, with all of its
attendant dangling ends, I realized I was doomed.

And here is another hem, or a lace edging, really. This bit of cottony fun was almost pitched overboard after the 50th time that I goofed it up, but in the end I was able to complete the edging. The rest of the sweater will have to wait.

A sweater? Oh, please! I'm just a tank top.
Could somebody please finish me already?

Since three shawls and three sweaters cannot possibly be enough to keep a knitter going, I also have some socks in the works. The first are knit in a yarn called Night Fury. I love the grey-black color and its little green stripes so much, I thought it would be a good idea to buy a second skein to use for something totally different. You know, in case I ever run out of knitting.

Wanida socks in Night Fury colorway

This little sock cuff is so abandoned that I think it's time to repurpose the yarn. The idea was to alternate two skeins of yarn with long color repeats and see how they interacted. The little I can see of it has been pretty cool, but I don't seem to be getting very far.

This mini-scarf exists just because it seemed like a bad idea to toss out some reasonably salvageable yarn that got cut off of my loom after the bajillionth time that it broke. Impressive progress, no?

I'm not even going to talk about this yarn, which was intended for a shawl.

The picture doesn't do it the proper injustice. The darker browns and reds are ok, but the bulk of the skein is made up of a thoroughly objectionable puce-y-tan color. I can't possibly wear it and if I gave the finished shawl to someone else, they might take it personally. Someone has cleverly suggested that the colors might be best used in a home decorating capacity, and I think this is a good idea. They suggested pillows, which did not appeal to me, so I'm thinking an afghan might do the trick. I would only need about 7 more skeins, and what could be better than 10 skeins of barf colored yarn?

I'll tell you what would be better: 7 skeins of hard-to-knit cotton chenille in an eye-burning shade of royal blue. I got this at the knitting guild's yarn auction last spring, because I have made two little washcloths from this kind of yarn (though not, heaven help me, from this particular color) and apparently, in all the excitement of the auction, I thought it would be a great idea to knit about 20 more.

Lest you find me exceedingly dull, I want to assure you that my good ideas are not limited to knitting. Sometimes I have cleaning ideas too. Here we see a locking cabinet that contains a bunch of china stuff that I never use.

The reason that I never use it is that it is extremely dusty. And the reason that it is extremely dusty is that all of the china is securely locked behind these marvelously porous and ugly metal grilles and I can't find the key.

Eventually, they became so dusty that I thought it would be a good idea to find a way to clean them, and so I tried to pick the lock. That turned out to be a useless idea, as did the idea of bending the grilles so as to pull them out of the doors. Not that I tried very hard, since I had my doubts about the wisdom of that idea in the first place. You will be relieved, I am sure, to learn that I found the key, or at least a key that fit the lock exactly. The problem, it turned out, is that I was looking near the cabinet for a small black key, whereas the key that opened the door was a larger silver key, which was inexplicably located in an entirely different section of the house. I still suspect it is an imposter.

And last, in a fit of culinary inspiration brought on by the impossible number of pastries we ate on vacation, I bought a donut pan. I thought this was a really great idea, although the donuts have yet to become a staple of our diet. They taste great, but they are a little . . . nontraditional looking, let'say.