Keep Going or Wait?

Summer seems to have leapt upon us, with the temperatures in the high 70s and an abundance of humidity. Many of the trees still seem a little confused, starting to bud out but not yet covered with leaves. Yesterday, the Philosopher and I ventured up to the Botanic Garden and found crab apple trees not yet blooming.  The tulips are about done, though. Caught with a lack of knitting pictures, I'll give you some floral ones instead.

The last remaining pod/vodcast that I regularly attend is TheKnitGirllls.  It's like having a knitting group in my home, only I don't have to run the vacuum and apologize for cat hair.  One of the hosts, Laura, is a teacher and has the summer off, so she does a 5K Stash Dash over the three months that she has slightly fewer obligations (I say slightly because we all know that one never has no obligations).  I think this is the fourth year of it.  The goal is simple: try between x date and y date, to knit up 5K worth of yarn. In 2011, I see I made it through about 3K.

One of the ways this is fun is that it's totally "cheater friendly."  Their description, truly. You can finish up a project and count the entire project--there just has to be knitting done on the project--weaving in ends alone doesn't count.  And here comes my conundrum.  I have several projects around the apartment that are more than halfway done and could probably be finished in the next two weeks before Stash Dash begins, but I keep looking at them and going, well, if I wait a couple of weeks they'll count. The justifications keep piling up: I don't have any current deadline knitting, it's gotten rather warm out, I need to figure out some other patterns I want to knit.  All of those sorts of things.

Such, different projects are languishing and others are getting rotation time to get them close to finished. Saturday evening I finally split the sleeves for the sweater and started down the body. This morning's commute was all knitting and then I had 3 hours of listening-meetings, I'm now about 8 inches down from the underarm. I'd optimistically grabbed an extra skein this morning of sweater wool on my way out of the door, now I'm glad that I did: I'm going to need to tie it early into the train ride home. This will mean that when I get home I can put it on waste yarn, try it on, and figure out how much longer I'd like it to be before I start ribbing at the bottom.  Yes, I probably should have worked on the Emergency Work Socks, the second of which has a scant 5 rows done. Oh well...

The most recent pair of socks are sitting at home, waiting for a final toe. The pink-red-brown scarf? Unloved up in a bin.

I did finish the next Philosopher's Scarf and it's even been washed. (Un)fortunately it didn't end up bleeding, so our next plan is to run it through with a new pair of jeans [I found new jeans that fit and ordered 3 pair!] to muddy the colors a little.  The reds are great but that robin's egg blue...

The sweater will hit a stopping point probably with the sleeves--those are somewhat fiddly and I'd rather not be wrangling size 8 (5mm) dpns on the train.  I know I could magic loop them but I probably won't.  I think I need to start on another Philosopher scarf, as oddly I've managed to not have any other yarn wound dedicated for socks.  It's all for scarves. Of course, I'm also considering going through the entire stash tonight, pulling out the remaining 10-15 skeins of "these will be socks", and winding them. It's silly, I know I still have that much to go and yet I caught myself in a slight panic over at BMFA, debating how many colors I could buy because obviously I was low on skeins to make into socks.  At best, at my very fastest, I'll run out sometime next year, but not having all the skeins wound and set aside makes me twitchy.

I also want to sort out yarn for a couple of new winter hats (left mine in a cab, of course), another pair of fingerless mitts (lost them), a complete matching set of hat/mittens/scarf that I've been planning for a couple of years.  And there's some surprise knitting that I really should get to....

I don't think I'll have any trouble coming up with 5K of inspiration.  Now if I can just get to 5K of completion, there might even be a small dent in the stash!