The Summer Solstice really gets the shaft in our family. We have a lot of traditions surrounding Winter Solstice, with more added each year it seems, but when the longest day of the year rolls around we have a bad habit of letting it slip by us.
It's not intentional. I love the thought of celebrating the beginning summer, it's just that it generally falls within days of both Will's birthday and Father's Day, so by the time the Solstice comes, well, we're a little celebrated out . Oh well, there's always next year. Or the year after.
Actually, I've decided that starting this winter (since, obviously, we didn't get it done for summer) we'll start a new tradition of giving handmade gifts for the Solstice. Or at least I will. OK, maybe it's just an excuse to plan on knitting something for everyone in our family.
Despite the nasty heat, the crazy lightening storms and the fact we spend half our life outside these days, I've been a knitting nutball. I finished the second shell for my slippers and am on to the last piece, which hopefully will go quickly because for some crazy reason I'm dying to knit sweaters. Sweaters! Seriously, it's an OVEN outside and I have sweaters on the brain. I blame Ravelry. Seriously, have you been there? It's like cool knitting projects exploded all over the place, too much inspiration! Too many must-do patterns. Maybe it's some kind of psychological reaction to the heat. My brain is so sick of the hot weather that it's just moved on to winter, regardless of the calender. So now my goal is to knit a sweater or other larger project for everyone by the Winter Solstice. That's a lot of knitting for someone who, a few months ago, was never going to knit again. By hey, a girl's allowed to change her mind, right?
Up until recently I've always thought of knitting as something I should do one project at a time. I'm not sure why, since I'm the queen of doing multiple projects all at once. I'm not even content to be reading one book at a time. But now that I've almost finished this long and, frankly kind of monotonous project with the slippers, I can see how having something else to switch to when i need a break from knitting 70 rows in the round without a change would be a good thing. I have this fantasy of sewing some white cotton drawstring bags and filling each with a different project that is mid construction. I know, I know, it's a little strange that the concept of organizing my knitting projects gets me all bubbly, what can I say, we all know I'm a little weird that way.
So, now I've got four patterns picked out (until I get on Ravelry again and find something different that I MUST MAKE) time to go hunt down some yarn, and maybe pick up some of that white cotton, because, you know, you can never be too organized, right?