You Might Be An Obssessed Knitter If.......

Yup. You might be obsessed when:

- you decide on your projects and pack them first for a trip

- you take 4 knitting projects, despite the fact you’re only going away for 2 nights (after all, there’s quite a lot of driving involved)

- you visit a new town. You visit the thrift shops – and ask if they have yarn. Or patterns. You look for yarn shops. You visit the only craft shop in town. It has one small stand of Patons wool in a very large space. They stock Country, Baby, Jet and Patonyle sock yarn. You actually stand there thinking about buying some – despite the fact that your stash is greater than the GDP of Outer Mongolia and you don’t use much Patons. Your stash is WAAAAAYYYYY bigger than this entire yarn stock.

- you go out to dinner, drink lots of red wine and attempt to design and knit a lace pattern in kid mohair. After spending the night knitting, you have to frog the lot, but YOU FEEL OK ABOUT THIS!

- you finish a sock, but have forgotten darning needles for grafting. You work out a method of grafting which takes another, finer double pointed needles and three times as long. It works. You are happy about this.

- you get five minutes of quiet time all to yourself. You use this time to tink back 4 rounds on a sock to where the count went funny, instead of relaxing or drinking wine.

- you wake in the middle of the night, in a strange room, and can’t get back to sleep. You spend the rest of the night working out 2 sock patterns, a reversible scarf pattern and a blog entry for when you get home.

- you miss your pattern books

- you worry about what blogpals have been doing while you haven’t been watching

- your queue of ‘want to knit this’ is so long that you are unlikely to make much of a dent in it before your 70th birthday. You feel OK about this.

- your stash has become so large that it now lives in 3 places. You seriously consider moving out all the sheets and towels in the walk in linen press, just so all your stash can be together

- you see a new sock yarn. You become rather anxious because you realise all the sock yarn in the world can’t be yours.

- you see a gorgeous DPN kit. You begin to scheme about ways to obtain one.

- your blog pals and fellow knitters occupy the first places on your Christmas list.

- you look forward to fellow knitter’s birthdays and Christmas, because you get the joy of buying yarn without actually adding it to your stash

- there are very few waking moments when knitting doesn’t occupy your thoughts. It is occasionally supplanted by thoughts of children and food. And wine. And books. But not as often as would be healthy.

- you wonder how this obsession crept up on you – but you aren’t all that bothered.


We had a road trip at the weekend, up to the North East of our beautiful state. We visited the town of the Accountant’s childhood and looked at the house where he lived. We drove about. We went to Mt William National Park and saw wombats and Bennett’s wallabies with joeys in their pouches. We went to the place I camped on a trip with the girls many years ago (it’s still a very nice spot and right on the beach).

We went out to a very nice dinner. Our waitress was a knitter. She liked my socks. It was a lovely break, except for the fact the weather was very windy and wet and quite cold. The place we stayed was great and the swimming pool was inside and heated (the Princess thought it was wonderful).

I had lots of time to knit in the car and finished one Feather and Fan sock and got halfway down the cuff on the other. I forgot a darning needle and missed my patterns.

I enjoyed not cooking for 2 nights. It’s not that I don’t like cooking, because I do. I just don’t enjoy the pressure of coming up with something that everyone in the family will think is wonderful every single night. Last night was 2 minute noodles for the kids and bruschetta and antipasto for the adults. This involved virtually no cooking. It’s a break that feels like a holiday.

I think I may be just a little knitting obsessed. I came back to Juno like an old friend and got 2 repeats done, so it is very likely (all knitting goddesses permitting) that I will finish the collar this week. If all goes particularly well, I may also block, sew and complete Juno this week. Then I can concentrate on socks. And Christmas presents. And Tea Cosies (for the swap) and the Swing Jumper. And Bella. And more socks.