Olympic Nail Biter

Well, I finished.  I would have posted this yesterday to commemorate the end of the actual Olympics, except that I was really REALLY tired from getting up and watching TEAM CANADA WIN HOCKEY GOLD!!  (Obviously pretty happy about it!)  I'm lucky enough to have a toddler who sleeps late (8:00 am) so getting up at 5 was a foreign concept... but worth it in the end.

I actually finished Umaro late Friday night, much to my relief.  A) I was getting sick of the pattern.  Umaro is a great blanket there is nothing wrong with the pattern, but as usual I just hit that ennui part of the knitting and my mind starts going "let's make something else that's not this."  B) I was cutting it close to having enough yarn.  My goal was to use as MUCH as the yarn as possible, and so I did my best to work down every skein as well as I could.  At the end I wasn't sure I was going to have enough to get through my border and cast off.

I was looking at this ball of yarn and going- "can I get 21 rows out of this?"

Nothing motivates quite like panicking if you have enough yarn to actually finish your project.  Here we are with just the border remaining and my heart is really pounding.  In my head I'm thinking "that isn't enough.... that ISN'T ENOUGH".

I start telling myself that if need be I can use the small leftovers that I had from each ball because they wouldn't actually knit up a full row.  "There will be a lot of ends to weave in" I tell myself, but I'm really pretty sure at this point I'm screwed.

Except that I wasn't.  I finished with just that much yarn above to spare.  WHEW.  I wove in the ends and declared myself finished!

I didn't include blocking the blanket as part as being done- so that will need to be done this week so that I can take some glamour photos of the blanket and post it here.

Looking ahead this is going to be a busy week of little things.  I'm finishing up a section on a WCOBB charity blanket and have another blanket expecting to show up soon as well.  Also, I want to knit 2 hats, to stay ahead of my hat project.  And, most importantly, I need to knit several swatches for my Vogue Knitting classes that I signed up for.  On top of that, I'd really like to kickstart my Stampede project, which I'm doing from scratch- I need to chart out my design and begin thinking about what I'm going to do there as well.

The next few weeks will be busy, but it feels good to just revel in the fact that I'm done this big project!