My eyes are bigger than my stomach...

...So to speak. While searching high and low for a US4 circ with which to cast on for my next project, I had a thought. Perhaps I have a few too many irons on the fire right now. (Metaphors abound today.)

Clockwise from top: Rupa's Baby Blanket, Skinny Skid Hat, sock that I'm improvising, second sock that I'm improvising, Pagona Shawlette.

I'm super bugged that I can't find the needle I'm looking for--24" US4. The Skinny Skid and Rupa's Baby Blanket are both using US4, but I know I have a 24"-er floating around here somewhere! Hmph. As soon as I finished that sentence, I remembered where it was :-P

But this brings me to my larger point. With 5 projects active on the needles (and a handful more dormant), why am I so eager to cast on for my next project that I searched high and low for that needle?? I have one theory. My summer vacation is fast approaching its end. In a week, I'll be off to camp for two weeks. I'll probably have little knitting time there, since I'll be "on duty" most of the time. Then after I get back from camp, it's only 10 days until we depart of India. I'll definitely be taking a couple small projects with me--we have lots of train travel planned. But when we get back in mid-September, I start work and perhaps subconsciously (though now not so subconsciously) I'm in a rush to finish as many things as I can before I go back to work, because I don't know what my free time situation will be like then. (It will probably be good, I'll only be working 20hr/wk.)

The other thought I have is that perhaps I should prioritize my WIPs a bit more. Instead of jumping from one partially completed project to the next, maybe I should try to knock a few of them off. It would be nice to have Rupa's Baby Blanket done by the time we go to India, even though I'd probably still have to mail it once we got there because I don't think we're going to see her. I've been at a bit of an impasse with it as I prepare to start the border. I have my plan for the border all charted out on knitting graph paper, but I'm a bit apprehensive about starting it, worried that it won't turn out. The blanket so far is quite lovely (if I do say so) and so I feel a lot of pressure to have the border shine as well. But it's not going to get any easier/less worrisome if I keep putting it off. If anything, the time crunch will make more me more worried. Oy.

Fun fact! All my current WIPs are using fingering weight yarn. :)