Today I got this urge to look at the submission dates for one of the online knitting magazines, the one that I had this design in mind for, and I realized that the submission deadline isn't until June! While I was looking for that, I found one for Interweave Knits magazine, for the Fall 2011 issue and I realized that my design works well (or at least I think it does) for one of the catagories that they are looking for. I look down the page and I see that the submission deadline is on Monday, March 14th. That seems do-able, but I look further and I see that the submission has to be submitted by mail and has to be there by Monday! This is Thursday. I need a proposal, a completed submission form, a sketch, two swatches (because of the variation in my design), and they all need to be labeled and in the mail before 5pm today. It was 10am when I saw this.
Now, a reasonable person with some sense would realize that they couldn't make the deadline because they have homework and a project to do and they can't get two "generous swatches" knit in time to get all of this in the mail...but I've never been accused of being reasonable. I decided to go for it! I wrote up the proposal (it's more like a three page essay on this pattern and how it came to be, plus a title page), and revised it. I saved it and the submission form to my flash drive and started knitting swatches. I finished my swatches at 3:30, gave them a quick steam block, and ran out the door to the shop where I could print everything out and label it all. When I was there, I realized that I was still missing the sketch, so I quickly whipped out the colored pencils and got busy. It's not my best work, but I think it gets the idea across. It all went into a page protector, and at 4:50pm I got it to the post office and out the door! It's going Express so they are guaranteed to have it in their hands by 3pm tomorrow.
Why do I do these things? Why do I toss out a perfectly good day when I wasn't tired and could have focused on my homework? Because I'm nuts! And I like living on the edge and facing rejection, lol. I've tossed two proposals out into the world, and they were both received very well. I'm hoping that this one will too, and that my next idea for Cascade will go over as well as the first one seems to (because I haven't even knit this one yet and I've already got yarn in hand to swatch for the next one). Maybe this is how I subconsciously chose to channel the nervous energy from the upcoming unemployment appeal on the 18th... Either way, the snowball is rolling down hill now and it's picking up speed. No going back now.
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