It’s time for our Friday rituals, the ceremonies of escorting one week out and preparing the next one. Which, around here, is the Gauge Check, where I take a look at my week and figure out where I’ve come from and where I’m going. Sometimes there are goals, sometimes I just talk about what’s going on in my life and my crafting. You are all welcome to join in in the comments.

Out my kitchen window, snow-covered rooftops. In March.

It seemed like the entire country was experiencing unseasonably warm temperatures this week.  Even when it comes to the weather, though, the Pacific Northwest is off doing its own thing.  While my friends on the East Coast and in the Midwest were complaining about the heat, we got… snow.  Several inches, in fact.  It came down thick and fast on Wednesday night, which is when we’d planned to celebrate the beginning of Spring.

This is how it looked out my kitchen window at about 11:00 yesterday morning, after much of it had melted.

Today, though, as if in apology, it was absolutely beautiful, with temps in the mid-50s (almost warm!) and glorious sunshine.  It’s back to the rain again tomorrow, but the high temperatures will continue to be in the 50s, which does hint at spring.

I did sporadic cleaning and arranging throughout the week – nothing overwhelming, but enough that I wasn’t too far behind on dishes.  The breadmaker came out on Wednesday (before the snow) and produced a lovely Italian herb bread.  I need to start looking for a countertop butter dish again, because fresh bread really needs butter soft enough to spread, and it just doesn’t work right coming out of the fridge.

My knitting this week hasn’t been entirely monogamous: I did put in a couple of rounds on the Enya socks here and there.  The Through the Woods hood is clipping along at a good pace, though, and the end really is in sight.  I finished the main body and the two tabs, and then picked up a million stitches around the inside of the hood and knit 2×2 ribbing for approximately eternity, then bound off.  (No, it wasn’t actually a million stitches.  It was about 120.  But I had to attempt to pick them all up three different times to get them even.  And I determined that eternity is 24 rows.  This is why I will never knit a 2×2 rib sweater.)  After that, I had to pick up MORE stitches around the bottom and do it again.  I dove in again, and again, the stitches were unevenly distributed across the bottom.  I said to myself, “Self, there has got to be a better way to do this.”

Fortunately for me, Myself is pretty clever sometimes.

Out came the measuring tape from my notions bag.  This is a small retractable tape I picked up at Pier One on clearance, and it lives, eternally, in my notions bag.  It comes out, I use it, it goes back.  This is the only way I can consistently find a tape measure.  I measured the bottom of the hood, where the stitches needed to go, I looked at the number of stitches the pattern suggested you might want to pick up, and I did some basic math.  (If you’re not so good with the math, there are apps that will do it for you; my numbers were easy enough that I was able to figure it out myself.)  Math told me about how many stitches per inch I needed to pick up, so I did that, checking every inch or two to make sure my count was right, because I did not want to have to do it again.  If my count was off on a given inch, I’d pull those stitches out and do it again.  I marked every twenty stitches (because I’m not good at counting, I’ll be honest) and ended up pretty much dead on.  Success!  Now… well, now it’s back to 2×2 ribbing for eternity.

Then there was the spinning.  I mentioned last week that the blue cake was tangled, and I needed to sit down and pick the knots out, so I sat down to do it on Monday.  And Tuesday.  Also Wednesday.  By Wednesday evening, I gave up, pulled out the scissors, and cut the knots out.  I finished plying the teal until I ran out, and then I started to ply the blue on itself.  This was harder, because the blue was less consistently spun, and I kept hitting patches that came apart.  Mostly I felted them together, but occasionally, I’ll admit it, I tied knots.  I don’t think this two-ply blue is going to be good for much of anything, but I’m okay with it.  It gave me some practice plying, if nothing else.  I plied the blue on itself until the cake collapsed and I hit more knots, at which point I gave up.  There’s not much blue left, anyway.

Next week, the blue-and-teal yarn is getting introduced to my niddy-noddy and a nice bath, and we’ll see how it turns out.

I promised the list of potential projects for the Year of Good Intentions, and then Jack threw me a curve ball that made me start reconsidering.  Now, I knit a lot for him (you may have noticed).  I knit for myself much less often, and generally only practical projects that get immediate use (like the Through the Woods hood).  So I was talking about potential projects with him, and he says, “How many of these are for yourself?”

I count.

“A lot of them,” I say.  One of the reasons I don’t delve into my library very often, I suspect, is that many of the patterns are ones that I wanted for myself, and, well, if I don’t knit for myself, they don’t get used.

What he ended up suggesting was that I knit all of them for myself.  He points out that these aren’t the only projects I’m going to be knitting – after all, I’m aiming to take a year with this, so it will be approximately one project a month, so if I want to knit something for him, or someone else, I can.  As a result, I’ll have to take another look at some of these to figure out which project I’d want to do if I were making something for myself.

Here, therefore, is the preliminary list of books and projects for the Year of Good Intentions (aka Library KAL).  They are presented in alphabetical order, more or less, by author.  The links will take you to Indie Bound, if you’re interested in purchasing the book.  If I were feeling really ambitious, I’d link the individual pattern to Ravelry.  Someday I may go back and edit this page so it does just that.  This is not that day.