The season

All around the blogesphere knitters are falling electronically silent as they turn away from their cameras, hunched over their flying fingers, back protectively turned against the computer screen and the window through which the virtual world takes a peek.

At the sound of the key in the door their ears prick and their heads fly up, craning to see which member of the family might just have made an unexpected return, one hand already reaching to stuff the needles and yarn under the nearest cushion.

To every thing its season, and with the first frost comes the season of Christmas knitting and another bond tightens its grip on my already unnatural attachment to serious scheduling and Excel spreadsheets.

As things stand, I am on course to have finished all of the Christmas crafting by my cut off date of 20 December. Some gifts are due by then, some have to be in the post before hand, but mostly I want to have some time to do crafty things of my own in the run up to Christmas - several kits for Christmas ornaments and a Christmas quilt, to name but a few.

I realise that by saying this I am inviting the Knitting Furies to smote me down, probably in the form of something felting, melting to my iron or involving a country-wide run on soft brown sugar but that's a risk I'm going to take. What I am absolutely not going to say is that at the moment I am a little bit ahead. Nope, definitely not!