This Little Alien Went to Market*

I figure everyone must have a system for determining what does and doesn't count as an actual UFO. I mean, these things are all relative, right? Does it become a UFO moment you cast on? Or is that a WIP?

How long does it take to make the transition? Let's say, hypothetically, that you get bored and wander off. When does it loose its shiny WIP status, and join the lowly, the unloved, the uncounted, the UFOs?

For myself, I have a graduated system (and clearly, if I put as much effort into actually knitting as I do to thinking about it, much of this post would be moot.)

(Image © Annais)

Pipe-Line Projects: these are the knits I'm dreaming about, reading the patterns and shopping for yarn. These are "what's next."

Current Projects: projects that are on the needles, and that I'm either currently, actively knitting, or have done in the very recent past

Once and Future Projects: projects that I used to be really excited about, but for whatever reason have fallen by the knitting wayside. These are projects that I will totally (someday) finish. No really. Stop looking at me like that.

I'm sorry, Do I Know You? Projects: Projects that I don't remember why I was knitting. I would frog them, but to do so would require admitting that I'd ever cast them on.

Yarn: Gone daddy, gone. I came, I saw, I frogged. As Stephanie Pearl McPhee would say, "I remember that I like yarn more than I like bad hats" (Knitting Rules, pg. 125).

So, How do you count your UFOs?

*When my youngest two children were babies, my husband liked to play "piggies" on their toes. Never one to leave well enough alone, we changed the rhyme every time we said it. Sometimes the piggies went to market to buy tofu (my husband is a hippie, what can I say?) Sometimes though, they weren't piggies at all. Sometimes they were aliens "This little alien cried NargleBleepZoop all the way home!" It seemed a logical progression from counting UFOs to counting aliens.