Cheating on the White Blanket

*sigh*

Okay... so you know how I said I wasn't going to work on anything else until I finished the white blanket and my dad's socks?

I totally lied to you... and myself.

I was good there for a while... working quickly away at the blanket, measuring to see how much progress I'd made, anxious for the magic number of 40 inches to appear, prompting me to cast that bad boy off. But, today, taking advantage of the yarn sale at AC Moore and Joanne's (yarn snobs look away... I still buy acrylic for baby blankets), I bought the pretty, cheerful colors for my friend's baby blanket and I could not resist it's siren call.

I suffer from 30 inch syndrome when making baby blankets. To begin with, I like my blankets to be 40 inches tall... it's a good length and makes the blanket useable for a much longer time. (And, I like to tell myself that someday that kid will look at it as their "blankie"- as I still have mine from when I was a baby that I don't have the heart to part with.)

The first 10 inches knit up really fast. I'm always excited to start a new pattern and I usually am just beginning to memorize a stitch pattern. Once I see how quickly those 10 inches came to be, I'm energized thinking "this isn't going to take me long at all!", and so I knit another 8 inches or so and then my brain starts asking... "how much do we have?" and then the measuring starts. I know I'm in trouble when I start measuring. Measuring means one thing- How Much Farther Do I Have to Knit This? How much more of this stitch pattern do I have to bore myself with? I manage to keep going... to keep plugging away.

And then it hits- 30 inch syndrome. Once I hit 30 inches I stop making progress. I will knit and knit and knit and knit and knit and knit and knit and knit and knit and knit and knit and knit and knit and knit and knit and knit and knit and knit and knit and knit and knit and knit and knit and knit and knit and knit and knit and knit and knit and knit and knit and knit and knit and knit and knit and knit and knit and knit and only get an inch. I'm sick of the pattern, sick of the yarn and quite frankly I start resenting the happy couple for having the audacity to "spawn" in the first place. I cannot think of anything but other projects that will prove to be more challenging or more interesting. I dream up patterns of such exsquisite beauty that people will literally swoon when they see them. Yet- these patterns will never come to be, because I am not convinced that I will never accomplish the last ten inches of the stupid blanket.

This is when I begin bargaining... first it starts with measuring... I'm now chronically measuring a blanket every 4 or 5 stitches to see how much progress I've made. I start telling myself that I can't measure until I get two or three or even four pattern repeats done-- since it's so demoralizing to see little progress. Bargaining doesn't last long though... I move on to the ADD stage- where I start something else and tell myself I will only work on it a little, just to take the edge off the dullness of the exsisting blanket hell. The problem here is that I am so excited and so energized and so happy to be working on the new project, that I will immediately start whipping it up, before I know it time has passed by in a blur, and I have a completely finished sweater and blanket that still requires 6 more inches before it's finished.

I used to be one of those people who knit one thing only and finished that one thing completely before casting on a project. (I also used to be a person who only bought the yarn she needed in that moment, whereas now I am compelled to stock pile yarn whenever I share a room with it.) I am not that person anymore... which is why I knit with guilt. There's always a "I should be working on this other item first" guilty feeling lingering over me, reminding me that I'm a naughty little knitter.

My goal is to finish the white blanket by Monday. By Monday it needs to be at blocking stage. I know I can do this. I KNOW I CAN. But can I make my heart listen to my head in this scenario?

Stay tuned...