The Danger of Ravelry...

...or what I did last week while I wasn't blogging. Not blogging freed up quite a bit of my time last week, and yes, I spent more time on Ravelry. I have to admit that at first, I wasn't sure about the forums and groups over there. It was like coming into the middle of hundreds of ongoing conversations, and it took a while for me to sort it all out. I kept feeling like everyone was talking but no one was listening. But last week, I had time to post more, and I discovered that when I post, people would answer back.

However, posting more on Ravelry has a hidden danger, too. I'm still enjoying the Weight Watchers group and the "So much to knit, so little time" group a lot. However, in addition to committing to 3 WIPs at a time, I have also now committed to exercising 3 times a week and losing 10 lbs. before Christmas. I'm not sure my friends and family could get these kinds of commitments out of me, but I have no problem making these promises to complete strangers!

Then, yesterday, I decided to explore the tag cloud. This is an alphabetical listing of all the tags used to describe all the groups on Ravelry. Clicking on any word will bring up a list of groups tagged with that word. Most of the words didn't interest me that much, but I made the mistake of clicking on the word "socks". That's how I found the "2008 sock knit along", which I rather impetuously joined. So I have now apparently committed to making a pair of socks a month for the whole of next year. We are starting with a basic ribbed sock in January, and then we will work up degrees of difficulty from there. It wasn't until much later in the day that it occurred to me that I might have a problem squaring the 3 WIPs at a time rule with a yearlong sock KAL. It may have to become 4 WIPs at a time. But at least it will use up some of my sock yarn stash.

And speaking of my stash, I have to close with a little anecdote. Over the past few weeks, my dh and I were talking about the fact that we need to reroof the house in about 5 years. Our plan is to take out a home equity loan and remodel the kitchen and the master bedroom and bathroom at the same time. He mentioned that he had planned on moving us and our queen sized bed into the guest room (aka the yarn room) during the remodeling but that at the moment that didn't seem like a possibility. (There's barely room to walk in there, the stash has taken over so.) But I assured him that 5 years was plenty of time to take care of the problem. You may have heard of Stalin's famous 5 year plans? Well, this is Priscilla's 5 year plan. I have 5 years to finish all my WIPs and use up my stash so that we can actually use the yarn room as a bedroom again. Think I can stick to a 5-year yarn diet? Yeah, me neither, but at least all these rash promises to strangers on Ravelry might actually help me move in the right direction!