Need help being selfish

January is supposed to be a month of knitting selfishly after knitting for the holidays. I'm still behind on my gift giving and so having a hard time being selfish. I need to knit two more pairs, okay really three. I'm just not excited to work on them. :-(

Maybe after this weekend I can get kickstarted to get them finished up before the end of the month?

I was going to start on a pullover sweater but found that my planned yarn was the wrong weight, so most likely wouldn't have enough if I started with that yarn. I'll still do the sweater, just need to find better yarn for the project. This led me to go through my queue thinning things out in the different categories and reorganizing things. Bonus, but not a lot of knitting done. I wanted to knit something though!

Then I remembered that I still had some handspun yarns in my bag set aside for making the Barn Raising Quilt squares. So that's what I did. I ended up frogging one square and re-doing the square and am much happier with how it came out:

The center of this block uses up the last little bit of my first hand spun yarn. It's spindle spun. A bit of indigo dyed falkland sample and then some over-dyed Opulent Fiber.

I then used the last of the over-dyed Opulent Fiber to make a block:

That used up the last of it. So I went to the over-dyed black bean yarn that I had used before to finish a block. I also had a small sample of California Red that I had spun. Its a bit heavier spun than the yarns I've been using but came out nicely as a block:

Blocking helped the two. It wasn't until done that I realized that they all three were very harmonious with each other. There was a lull in the weather so I pulled out all the blocks and using the idea of a nine patch, grouped the squares. With a bit of jostling of blocks I've found that I have four nine patch sets. I think I need at least two more nine patch sets, possibly four.

Here's the four sets of nine patches:

Purples, blues and greens

Oranges with a few purple tones that I pulled over. I could swap out the bottom center of the upper set with one of the darker purples in this set.

Greens with some purples

Naturals - creams and browns

Putting them all together:

I don't have any small fiber samples to spin up and haven't used any other handspun yarns in projects, so there won't be any new blocks soon.

I've been looking at the Log Cabin Square to use up worsted weight yarn leftovers. This would make partial blanket number four. I'm thinking larger blocks though, nine inch or twelve inch. I've found some afghan square patterns that I could use so it wouldn't be the same pattern for the entire project. I kind of like the idea of having different squares pulled together. So do at least two in each pattern and piece together?

Then while looking at my blocks that I am thinking of doing, I find a Ravelry message. I've won a pattern! How cool. I was the random number picked on Kate's Hello Knitty blog contest. I hadn't gone to look at any of the details of the patterns, but had said out of the ones listed that I liked Thorn.  Its not your normal triangle shawl. It's in fingering weight and calls for a heck of a lot of yarn. I do have a couple of lace weight yarns that I had thought to pair in the past. This might be the project for them. I'll have to give it a go and see how the three work out together. May have found my selfish knitting that I can also take to 12th Night.