Mama's Growing Mangoes

My mother likes to grow things. Or perhaps I should say my mom likes to start things growing. My grandma, Mom's mom, could grow anything. If that woman spit on an acorn you'd have an ancient oak in under a week. My mother, on the other hand, has had issues with things growing. She tries. God bless her, she does try. Currently in the kitchen is a mango pit sitting in a shallow bowl of water trying to root. It may actually do so. She got the pineapple top to root. She gets lots of things to root. Then they just...kinda sit there.

It's not that Mom has no follow through, she does. She's been married to my dad for 47 years and y'all, that's some serious damn follow through.  She just has an immensely busy schedule and she doesn't seem to have time to plant the things she roots. For those of us that knit, crochet or craft in general, the pineapples, mangoes, celery and such are Mom's WiPs. Yes, yes now we hear the collective, "ah ha" happening. We all understand WiPs, or works in progress. We all have something in our lives that are our mangoes. For some knitters, it's socks. You know who you are. For some crocheters, it's that blasted afghan that never seems to get finished but you WILL, by God, get to it eventually.

I have my own mango. It's my Cathedral Rose Window afghan. I have it started, I just can't bring myself to go any further. I want to yell at it to go on without me. To save itself. But then I'd have bigger issues than WiPs if my afghans started dragging themselves toward the door in search of more dedicated people with hooks. Behold. My mango.

My problem isn't time. It's summer and I'm not in school so time is NOT an issue. Although, I have had a pretty active social life this summer. I have tan lines!! I went outside!! And even though I just got a job for the first time since 2006 (yay me! a job!!!), it's part time and still won't be much of an issue. No, my problem lies with all things shiny and new. I see a new pattern, or get new yarn or hell, get a crap load of free yarn and my mind goes insane with all the ideas and the needing to start things and make them happen now and oooo I wanna try THIS, and....well, you get the picture. After the granny square afghan from the last post, I liked the color play so much that I decided to do more color play and am currently in the middle of this one:

Once all the squares are sewn together, it will bee a black field with polka dots! i got to figure out how to turn circles into squares. I will radiate out in a pastel rainbow, ending with pink on the outside. In the second picture you can see the bag on the right full of polka dots waiting for black squares. Then....well, then I got two black garbage bags full of yarn. With some things that had already been made. There is so much variegated and solids that I normally wouldn't buy so my mind has gone INSANE. So many possibilities. I wanna sit in a room with nothing but ALL my yarn and figure out what I have and color sort and place together and holy crap there's so much yarn!!!

See my problem? Okay good. On the same page? Awesome.

So of course with all the new things, I now have more WiPs, cuz....yarn.

This is one I started yesterday. The flower squares were already made but there's LOTS of that yarn in all the colors.

I sewed all the squares together and worked 2 more rows of the white around them. now I am working on just making a solid blanket bottom for it in simple double crochet, and once it's long enough, I'm taking that pretty pale green and putting a scalloped edge on it. I'm hoping it will look like one of those old fashioned blankets with the hand made embroidery across the top. in my head it is gorgeous. it also makes me miss my grandma cuz y'all, she would have LOVED this. Hell, she might have claimed it for her own. 

So what are you working on?