Broadening Horizons...and Other Challenges

Okay, so I was just reading Lolly's comment to yesterday's post, and it once again got me thinking about my project of choice for the first month of Project Spectrum. I was thinking about how I was griping about red yesterday -- and how it's not my color -- and then I looked down and realized that I was wearing one of my favorite old hand-me-down sweatshirts. And it just happens to be red. Duh. So that got me thinking even more about this whole project. It's supposed to be about exploring color, right? About broadening our color horizons. So, gosh darnit, I'm going to learn something from this experience. And during the month of March, I will learn to appreciate red, which I rarely wear, and pink, which I only recently started wearing again, after being over-pinked as a kid, being my mother's only daughter and all. So here's what I'm going to do: I'm going to dye myself some yarn in all kinds of reds and pinks. And then I'm going to knit it up into whatever it tells me it wants to be -- whether that's a scarf or a shawl or a One Skein Wonder. And I will wear it with pride.

And speaking of challenges...I'm once again amazed today by the unpredictability of felted projects. I've been working on a project out of Wool of the Andes, which, I've found, felts like crazy in a matter of minutes. This time, however, I used a double strand of WOTA. I ran it through an entire cycle, and it barely felted. Amazing! So I'll just have to run it through again.

Today I'm facing a non-knitting challenge, too. Yesterday was my Big Deadline for getting proofs back to my publisher so he can get everything printed. Of course, the deadline would coincide with the weird bug that I picked up this week -- the one that made me just a little bit out of it. But I got everything done in time (though, thanks to said bug, I'm not totally sure that everything I sent made sense). Today, however, I got a note back asking if I had my text for the book's back cover. Crap. The book's back cover copy is seriously important. And, of course, I haven't written it yet. So now I have to crank out something witty, something that will make people want to buy my book, by, oh, right now. I started writing, and then I came up with a brilliant idea. Since the book is a collection of fake news stories, what I really need is a few really good fake quotes for the back cover. But, of course, that means that I have to actually come up with really good fake quotes. Perhaps if I take a little more of my daytime cold and flu medicine, along with another couple of cans of Mountain Dew, I'll be in the right mood to write it. Wish me luck -- and if you've got any good fake quotes for the back cover of a book full of fake news, please send them my way. I'll love you forever. Until then, it's back to the fridge for another Dew for me...