The holiday crunch

I read somewhere that there are only 44 knitting days left until Christmas, which has me a little bit on edge... I have six projects I need to finish for the holidays.

1. Husband sweater - it's about 25 percent done. It's times like these that you reconsider having married a 6'5" 225 pound man. It takes a lot of yarn to cover that frame in a sweater! Luckily he has a January 10 birthday, so I can always put it off a bit, if need be.
2. Mom's sweater - 40 percent done. The back is done and I'm about half the way through one sleeve. Mom is coming to town on or around the 28th of December to celebrate ZEN's first birthday, so I might just decide that I don't want to ship it anyway, and buy myself an extra week or so.
3. Husband socks - One done, one half done. These will get finished, if I can motivate myself to keep looking at brown yarn in stockinette stitch for a bit longer.
4. Socks for Maggie - I have one and a half done here, too. And my goal is to finish them before Thanksgiving and send them on their way. The sock drive ends November 30, so I really want to beat that date handily.
5. Scarf for my super-cool scarf swap partner. The lovely Bev has entrusted me with some yummy SWS to make a scarf for her. It's coming along just fine. I have about four feet done, and it will end up being about 5 1/2 or 6 feet long. I'm using the My So Called Scarf pattern. This should be done early this week.
6. Scarf for my sister - this will happen if the yarn I've ordered arrives before December. If it doesn't, she'll get it for her March birthday. Not quite as appropriate as for Christmas, but she can deal.
7. If the yarn for her scarf doesn't arrive, I will make a scarf for my friend/coworker, Jenni. I have yarn in mind for her, but I'm waiting until early December to know whether I can budget the time.

If all of this gets done (Ha!), I might have time to knit a few toys for ZEN, and also for my cats and my sister's cat. And if not, there's always next year, right?

Given that today was Sunday, you'd think it would be a good chance to catch up on some of this knitting, right? Well, actually, no. I did spend 3 hours this morning engaging in knitting pursuits, but they were wholly unrelated to the above tasks. Lily Chin was in town, teaching a workshop at Stitches N Scones. The workshop was about reversibile cables. Both of the Christmas sweaters I'm making involve cables, so it was appropriate, I suppose. It was a pretty good class and a mostly positive experience. I think I would have preferred to take the workshops she offered yesterday - one was on finishing techniques/edgings, and it sounded just wonderful. Hwoever, I'm just happy to have had the chance to attend today. It's not always easy to get away for a chunk of time when you have a 10-month-old!

Maybe I'll try to get my act together and take a few pictures to brighten up this blog. For now, though, good night and have a great week!