Since I felt a bit under the weather yesterday, I stayed home and finished the table runner and enjoyed the rainy, spooky Hallowe’en day. I will post a proper photo of it once I get the film developed. I enjoyed that so much that I intend to start another table runner today — for Thanksgiving. I have good reasons for doing so.

First, whenever I enjoy a project, I find that ideas for doing it a little differently come to my mind, so I want to go ahead and do it again with variations. In this case, I felt like doing lovely sinuous vines for the pumpkins — but that would not have worked with my funky, primitive Jack o-Lanterns. So I am going to do another with applique, using blues and fall colors so it will look good with my Blue Willow. I have a cool idea for piecing Indian corn from my Hallowe’en table runner scraps, too.

Second, I have more people coming to Thanksgiving dinner than I had thought — excellent news — so I will need to use more space to set out the buffet, and will of course need a runner for it. That’s not much of a reason, but I’m sticking to it. And third — because there has to be a third — table runners are to quilting what scarves are to knitting: relatively quick, flexible as to size and shape, and not needing much in the way of materials. So they are a good way to try out new things.

The reason that I need these excuses — er, reasons — is that I still have 10 knitting projects to complete before Christmas. I will therefore have to complete roughly one project every five days in order to have everything finished in time. And I still have to  go to work and to the gym every day and class and rehearsals several times a week, keep house, feed people, care for my family, prepare my music, read, and otherwise conduct my life. Well, some of the knitting projects are small. Some are big, too. Hmmm. I have four more repeats to go on the second DNA scarf. Perhaps that will become a completed project in the next five days. Depending how much time I spend on the new table runner.