The glorious queue.

I'm not gonna lie: my knitting life is a little boring right now. The only project I have going is the second glove for Dashing, which I may or may not have only cast on a few hours ago. Yes, it was supposedly a Christmas gift, but the thing is that my boyfriend got dragged on a family vacation (because going to school in Montana for most of the year apparently doesn't constitute being away from here often enough?) and won't be back until January 1st. I knew I wasn't going to finish his gift before he left, so I suggested we just exchange 1 gift before he left and leave any others until after he got home. Gives me more time, plus maybe he'll get me something pretty on his trip! (If you're curious, the gifts we did exchange were a 2008 Slingshot organizer and a massive street atlas of Metro Detroit. Ah, romance!)

So, let's talk about my queue and all the awesome selfish knitting I'm going to be doing now that the holidays are over! Ok, I do have some gifts left -- gotta finish up Dashing, there are a few tiny secret knitted gifts I'd like to send out soonish, and I never made those cool mittens for my buddy Jacob. I'll get to those when I get to them, though. (I think he knew better than to expect them from me remotely on time. I still owe him a cheesecake from his birthday last July...)

Anyway, how much do you love having a queue on Ravelry? It's wonderful! I have friends on there who queue literally hundreds of items, meaning that when I check my friend activity page I get introduced to all kinds of new patterns daily. Me, though, I keep my queue reasonable; right now I've got 7 items in it. They're all things I fully intend to knit within the next few months, rather than things I'd like to knit at some point in my life (those millions of patterns go into a huge file on my computer). And I am obsessively thinking about the first item on there all the time lately:

• The 18 Seconds to Sunrise Hat (Ravelry link/Pattern) A weird name for a cute hat! I need a hat, guys. I have a couple: one I stole from my boyfriend and one my friend Sara passed on to me. Oh, and I found a bizarre old Russian-looking fur one when cleaning my room yesterday (no idea where that came from... fur is gross, so I promise you I didn't buy it - probably someone left it at my house a million years ago). They're ok but they're not so me and they're really not even that warm.
  
  The reason I have so few hats is that I did not understand that I was capable of looking ok in hats until I visited Brian in Montana last October and it was like 20 degrees out all the time and I was kind of secretly staying in his dorm room on the all-boys floor (scandalous, I know! But hotels there only rent to you if you're over 21 and we aren't, which is totally not my fault). So on the first day or so he plopped one of his hats on my head and I started to protest about how stupid it looked, but then I thought, "Hey, this is warm! And easier than sneaking to a girls' floor to wash my hair!" And later I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and that was that: hats are my new best friends.
  
  Ok, so I've understood that I can wear hats for a couple months now, but surely you can understand why I haven't bought any. Cute hats in stores provoke the universal knitters' response from me: "Oh, I'll just make it!" Nevermind that it may involve plenty of techniques I don't know and that I don't have the yarn or the needles for it and that my ears are cold right now! I could make make myself a hat, and so I must. I've bookmarked roughly a kajillion hat patterns, but this one calls out to me the most. I don't really know why, but it's just wildly appealing to me. I spend an appalling amount of time fantasizing about it: the potential yarns and colors, the amazing way it will look when it's done. Oh man, I can't wait!


• The Hot Lava Shrug (Ravelry link/Pattern) This might be one of the first things I ever queued on Ravelry (I reorder the thing so much that I can't tell anymore). As soon as I saw it, I knew it had to be one of my first post-holiday projects. Again, the potential! The colors I could use! The buttons or brooches or various other items I could use to fasten it! Endless daydreaming fodder, I'm telling you.


• The Stewie Griffin Doll (Ravelry link/Pattern) Believe it or not, this will actually be a gift for my mother. She is beyond obsessed with Family Guy and I think she will like this more than anything else I could possibly knit for her. This was going to be her Xmas gift but I quickly realized I wouldn't have the time, so now I'm doing it for her birthday in March. I think she'll be completely surprised by it and I seriously can't wait to see her reaction!


• The Unbelievably Adorable Hearts (Ravelry link/Pattern) There are no words for how freaking cute these are! Lynn at ColorJoy linked to them recently and I was overcome by an urge to make thousands of them. I mean, can you imagine a cuter or quicker Valentine's Day project? That "holiday" tends to make me want to throw up a little, but I don't care because these are just too good! I wanted to link the pattern in case any other knitters would have the same reaction. If you're one of the non-knitters to whom I would give something like this...just pretend like you never saw it.

So, anyway, there are some of the queued patterns fueling my knitting daydreams at the moment. Sorry if that was long & nonsensical -- I woke up with an unbelievable amount of pressure in my sinuses and am on so much cold medicine that earlier I was having brilliant thoughts like, "Nine times three can't be 27! It just doesn't make sense!" Math has never been my strong suit, but...what I'm saying is that I miiiight be a little out of it today.

Any patterns you're presently obsessed with or itching to try out?