Hence, the Name

Here is the craptastic, crapalicious, craparrific crapghan. If you put on sunglasses, you might be able to look at this picture closely enough to see that I'm just beginning to apply the border. Warning: Viewer beware! I won't pay your medical bills if your corneas are burned.

This is a Red Heart afghan for my oldest nephew, The Teenager Who Drives. He's military-mad and his bedroom is decorated in American flags, video game boxes, dirty clothes, and White Sox paraphernalia. So, when it came time to make his special blanket in grandma's "single" pattern, we picked out this insane variegated yarn named, appropriately, Stars and Stripes. I hate the yarn -- there are too many imperfections, too many variations in spin and thickness and loft and color -- which gave rise to the nickname. Crap + afghan = crapghan.

My grandmother crocheted bed-sized blankets for all of us -- her kids, their kids, and in some cases, their kids. In 30 or so years of crocheting, I'd be willing to bet she made 150 of them. When she ran out of beds to blanket, she started making enormous "throws" (actually, also twin bed-sized) for the backs of couches. She also made a good number of crib blankets, but she preferred the bigger ones because they would take her longer than ten minutes.

If you were reading the blog this spring, you know I pulled out her special "double" pattern to make a crib blanket for my uncle and his wife, who had their first baby this July. That double pattern and the single pattern I'm using for the crapghan were the only two patterns she ever used to make afghans. No granny squares for her! She taught me the patterns one day sitting at a picnic table in her backyard, under an enormous old oak that we all referred to as "the shady tree." Many of my happiest memories developed under the shady tree, and that's certainly one of them.

I get wicked nostalgia whenever I think about this, and making the blankets is a way of honoring her memory. The crapghan is number 3 of 5 for the nieces and nephews. Number four will be a forest green one for Danger Boy, but I'll finish a sweater or two before I cast that on.

And it looks like this one will be done in time to pass it off to the teenager at a family gathering on Sunday. Whew!

Getting Closer!

Today I finished knitting the back yoke of Catherine Parr. This was knit in the round to the armholes, split, and the yokes are knit separately. I've already threaded the live front stitches onto the needle, and it's ready to go.

My original hope was to have this done by the end of the year. But I've also been working hard on the crapghan -- I'm into the last 6 oz. ball on that, and believe me, 6 ounces is nothing when the whole thing tips the scales at 84. Yeah, that's right, it's a seven-pounder. I want that thing done so bad I can almost taste it. It's too big and heavy to lug from room to room, so I keep ducking into the back bedroom, where it lays on the couch in all its eye-killing glory, to add a few stitches.

If I can finish the crapghan this week, I still have an outside chance of finishing Catherine Parr before the end of the year, which is another one so close to the finish line that I can hardly stand it. Much depends upon my job. We keep having these odd production issues due to technical/software problems, and every time that happens, I lose several hours trying to repair things. And I don't have spare multi-hour blocks of time laying around just waiting for a technical disaster to claim them.

Take Saturday. Case in point. I rarely take a whole day off -- I'm almost always reading or editing for at least a few hours each day. But I planned to take Saturday off and wrap gifts, do some cooking, and, of course, play with my yarn. I'd bought a new movie some weeks ago and still hadn't watched it. (Marie Antoinette, the "new romantics" version.) And you know, a day off once every few months or so doesn't make me a slacker.

But then one of our books came back from the typesetter loaded with major errors due to this technical glitch, and I spent 10.5 hours in my chair, fixing the manuscript. Pissed me off.

I'm starting to give some serious thought to goals for the New Year, and much of my thinking now revolves around time management. Change begins with me. It may affect others, and they may resist it, but I have to initiate it or it won't happen. And you know, I'd like to actually wear Catherine Parr someday.

One of my favorite time management tricks is the kitchen timer. I keep one on my desk. Set it for 45 minutes or however long, and buckle down on a project. Then when the timer goes off, I stop. No matter what. I get up, walk around, refill my mug or water bottle. Throw a load of laundry in the machine, wash the dishes, anything that keeps me on my feet. I usually set the timer for between 5 and 15 minutes during this stage, and when it goes off, I stop, return to my desk, and dig back in to my task for another timed sprint.

It may sound counterintuitive, but it's a technique that can keep me fresh throughout the course of a day, alternating desk work (in long sprints) with short bursts of physical activity. And there's something mentally satisfying about portioning out my tasks -- so many turns of the timer for editing, so many for submissions, so many for management tasks. As an added bonus, I always know exactly how much time I've put in on any particular project. (It's an old lawyer thing -- tracking time per task and project for billing and productivity purposes.)

So do you have any time management or productivity tricks that you can recommend?

Keeping It Honest

This isn't a real post. This is just to acknowledge that, yes, I promised to C-word one skein of Dead Fart for every knitted item finished. And, yes, technically, I finished those trampoline socks, though they need repair and are in jail until they promise to be better behaved. Or until I get smarter. Whichever comes first.

Anyway.

So I made good on my promise, and the crapghan is now 60" on the long side, 56.5" on the short side. I short-rowed twice and it only gained me a half inch!

In answer to Vicki: Yes, the pattern is mainly shell stitches with a border which will be added after the body is hooked. This is what granny called a "single" afghan. She has a recipe for a "double" in which two layers of shell stitches in contrasting yarn are ... I keep wanting to say double-knit here, but it would be double-crocheted. Or something. Whatever hookers call that stuff. The end result is a bulletproof reversible afghan that weighs about four hundred pounds.