Maybe a Bit Overwhelmed

Every year during the Tour de Fleece, there's a team called Hopelessly Overcommitted. I'm starting to feel like that name is appropriate for my knitting life this month. I had projects on the needles already that I was hoping to finish soon (my sweater and the shawl design), but those are ending up having to take a back seat at the moment.

First, yarn showed up late last week for a sample for a pattern with a third-party publisher, so I'm scrambling to get that done by the end of the month at the latest so I can send it off (the sample has to be back with the publisher by mid-June and has to cross an ocean to get there, so I want to allow plenty of time). Then, Rainbow reminded me that I said I would knit a hat for one of her teachers who just had a baby girl last week (well, technically the hat is for the baby, not the teacher, but you know what I mean). I cast on last night using some Knit Picks Swish Worsted that had long been in my stash and Susan B. Anderson's Bunny Tail pattern. This should be a quick knit -- what you see here is probably less than an hour's worth of knitting:

I've also got some other projects to finish this month, for Rainbow's other teacher, who is retiring at the end of the year. I picked up these two skeins of Malabrigo Rios in Water Green at Knitsburgh last week, intending to knit one myself and have Rainbow knit the other one. But she's decided that she'd rather I knit up both of them, so I am going to use them for the Sitka Spruce set by Tin Can Knits.

I think I can get all of this done this month, but it's going to be close -- I'm really going to need to knit in every spare minute. The baby hat will be easy enough to do on the nights when I'm on bedtime duty with Rainbow (I can knit while she's reading and then while I'm sitting with her after lights out), and the design sample is coming with me to work every day. A worsted weight hat and mittens also should be fairly quick, but I think getting them done and ready to be presented to the teacher by the last day of school (which happens to be a month from today) will likely mean ignoring my Quill sweater until they're done. At least this weekend I know I will have some dedicated knitting time, as I have some girlfriends coming over on Sunday for lunch and knitting. It's something a group of us used to do many years ago, before there were kids for several of us, so it'll be nice to catch up with everyone and make some decent knitting progress in the process.