Derailed by life!

I've only been working two sharp and pointed objects lately, a pair of #8 Silvalume knitting needles.  I'm incubating art ideas and coping with the fact I'm dreading studio clean up in the basement by knitting a baby blanket for my nephew and his fiance, who are expecting a baby in January.  It's a bit weird to become someone's great aunt when I've never been a mom, but since it's worked out fairly well to be just a regular aunt-aunt, I am not very nervous about the impending "great." (It's very fun to see my mother freaked out about becoming a great grandmother. Deja vu from when she freaked out about becoming a grandmother!) 

The blanket I'm knitting is something I'm just making up.  It's all yarn from another sort of started but not completed project - last summer a woman from the Cancer Center in Green Bay contacted me about knitting artisan chemo caps to commemorate their opening.  I ordered up some yarn, started making caps (finished a couple I modified from this pattern on knitty.com) and never heard from her again...so I have the two caps and they sit on a shelf in my laundry room closet awaiting the opportunity to be sent off to someone in chemotherapy - I don't know if I'd call them "artisan."  And the leftover yarn is going into a baby blanket.  I don't know about the karma of it all - but I do know I really wanted to talk about design for the hats, wanting to make the best chemo caps ever, and this seemed to be beyond the volunteer coordinator's ability - I think she just wanted them to be funky, I wanted them to be attractive but well designed and above all, functional.  (I'm guessing they found a different source for the caps, since as I said she never contacted me, and I hope it was a group somehow connected with Green Bay's best yarn shop, Monterey Yarns.) Ideally, I would have liked to design the caps, dye the yarn, knit the caps and really do it right start to finish - but that seems like a really nice full-time job.

The problem with being an academic is that many things go unattended to summer-to-summer. It's like I'm always being confronted with what I didn't do the last summer.  Summer is basically one long to-do list of things to make and fix and arrange and record, so that during the school year, I something to report on to show I'm worth paying (besides that teaching thing.) Already this year I'm going to probably miss a deadline for a book I feel I should be in, but I'm having issues with the weather making the house too dark to shoot an image of a particular wearable, which I have to be wearing in order for it to make sense, and Man runs out of patience for these projects.  I don't know why he doesn't have hours to follow me around our house with my camera, looking for neutral walls with adequate light!  I guess it would help if we didn't have art on all our walls. I'm so totally blowing this deadline. Sigh.  I guess I should learn how to use the timer on my camera, and do the self-portrait thing all the photo kids are doing these days.