Did we survive the holidays?

OK, it's not as if I spent all of the holiday season crocheting, but the time away from usual routine does allow a gal to complete some long standing projects.  Shawl #2, finished and blocked this morning.  Something about this shawl, I must admit, says: "beware of seriously skilled hooker".  Take, for instance, the lace work, the fine yarn (that would be LACE weight, or otherwise known as ZERO) the fastidious adherence to pattern, and, well, the seriousness of it all.  In fact, I threw the thing on today and had to take off all the regular clothes that I wear (oversized flannel shirt, thick brown crochet skirt, scarf, and hat.  So what does this mean?

Photo credit: Peter

Yes...it needs cropping, but look at our fantastic new shelf!!!

I'm trying to take it all in stride, lest I veer down the "wrong" crochet path.  Take, for instance, the very magazine that I found this pattern in.  Sometimes I look at the photos of yarn, patterns, models, the whole nine yards, and I feel the consumptive pull that is the very thing that I was trying to get away from when I resumed my yarn work.  Well. Duh.  Just like triathlon, cooking, parenting, music appreciation, house-improving, and every single other thing that touches our modern lives, there's somebody out there better, faster, more beautiful, more clever, and probably posing on a mountainside with a long flowing head of not gray hair with a really nice looking frock that could be modeled in the sundance catalog or garnet hill or wherever we want to be when we grow up and finish the work of accumulating the things that we think we want.  

This is more like it....I am learning that we're supposed to take pictures of handwork that enable the viewer to actually see the product.

So I'll go ahead and say it: it's January 2nd at it's time to assess or look forward or whatever it is we want to do when we turn the page.  I want to make every kind of crochet that ever existed. I don't want to be the best, and I don't even want to do one sort of crochet really well, but the other day when I read about crochet socks from Tajikstan, I thought to myself: "I have to make me one of those socks!".  So that's it, pretty simple. It's that simple desire, like reading all of Cormac or Joyce Carol Oates or like working one's way all the way through Prime Suspect or The Wire or whatever show ever mattered to us.  So, in the coming years, I can expect to keep on plowing through projects, and try not to get too bogged down in that afghan that can cover soldier field (remember the sweater that ate Oakland?), but we'll get there....or at least die trying.