Monday, June 05, 2006

Restoring order to chaos, or reviewing my WIPs!

Well, I didn't get out for any fiber adventures this weekend like Dee did (check out her entry for Friday, June 2nd - unfortunately, her weekend went downhill yesterday and I hope her eye is ok), but by staying home I still managed to have a "fiberlicious" weekend! It was one of those rare weekends when the housework was caught up and we had no family obligations, so I actually had some time to myself. So I decided to take a break from blogging and try to bring some order to my WIPs (or Works in Progress). Wow, had they gotten out of control!

As I have been reading other people's blogs (and I will get my links list straightened out one of these days and start linking to some of them), I have been thinking about WIPs. Generally speaking, everyone has at least one, and most of us have more than one. But I seem to have enough projects started that I can actually separate them into several categories:

  • I have WIPs that I am actively working on. Usually this is because I have some sort of deadline for finishing them - gifts that I want to give by a certain date, or my guild is collecting for a charity donation. Projects in this category have a reasonable chance of getting finished someday.
  • I have WIPs that I would really like to work on. They are going well, I am happy with the project, but work on items in the first category keep interfering or I have just slowed down on them for some unknown reason. Projects in this category have a 50/50 chance of getting finished.
  • Finally, I have WIPs that I haven't looked at in years. Sometimes these are things that I started but they just went disastrously wrong. For instance, I tried to crochet a scarf lengthwise using the seed stitch. Apparently, I didn't swatch my gauge well, because the wider this thing got, the shorter it got. I have never seen crochet pull in that much! So yesterday, I just cut it loose and disposed of it. I still need to pull out some scarves that I started that have gotten pushed to the back of the closet and figure out just what I don't like about them. Anyway, projects in this category have almost no chance of getting finished.
So after reviewing all of my WIPs this weekend, I decided to list the ones I would like to work on this summer, to try to keep myself on track. I came up with a list of 10 items I want to finish! We'll see how that goes. I will post about them as I work on them. I did manage to finish two preemie blankets this weekend, and I should finish a third tonight. Then I can start focusing on my list.

I also managed to take some pictures this weekend, so I thought I would leave you this morning with a picture of my sock. This project is definitely in the first category! As a matter of fact, I know it will be finished a week from Thursday, my last night of class.

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