Sheep On My Stuff

Merry Christmas!* A question that might be asked of me, if someone were asking me questions (and indeed she is! or rather, I am! check entries tagged "q & a" for more questions from myself to myself!), is: How much holiday knitting do you do, and how much time do you need to do it?

It varies! First of all, there's only one knitting project I do every year for the holidays, come hell or high water: I make my mom a hat. Mom likes hats, and I like knitting, and it is an excellent fit! Also, Mom lives in Indiana, where knitted hats are a joyful thing in the winter. I wonder if she'd like one in March. It's still cold there in March. ^_^ (I have decided that if Mom can send me things for Girls' Day, even though I am 30 and married, I can send her things for Girls' Day, too. So there.)

A hat for Mom takes maybe three days max, depending on the pattern. Hats are lovely and short and generally easy. However, marking out a week is not a bad idea; one of the things I was working on this year got derailed when I cut myself on the finger. It took three days for that to be healed enough for me to start knitting again.

Sometimes I'm working on other projects for the holidays; this year I made an aran sweater for a friend to give to her husband. That probably took four weeks, all told.

Sometimes I do scarves, shawls, or other items that I've made out of love for the recipient; mark out a good six to eight weeks for those.

This last year I made a last-minute argyle stocking for Grant; it took two weeks of only-during-work-hours knitting (and the weather buggered that up for me, too, because he worked from home half that time).

If you've been doing the math in your head, you may have noticed that these add up to a total of anywhere from 13 to 15 weeks, and to pad the estimate a little more, perhaps 16 weeks would be a good way to round that out.

Four months. Just for holiday knitting. Really? Yep! Really!

The moral of this story is this: If you think you might want me to knit something for you for the holidays, ask me by March. ^_^ (It also explains why, after the holidays, I spend a few months going OH GOD OH GOD I CAN KNIT FOR MYSELF ALL MY KNITS ARE BELONG TO ME AHAHAHAHA ME ME ME ME ME. When I spend a third of the year knitting for other people, and as the year goes by it's a greater and greater percentage of that time, by the time I'm done I really want my knitting time for myself again.)

* Merry belated Christmas, that is to say; I'm writing this as a catch-up post on February 16, 2009. >_>