Every season, Fraser Valley Regional Library chooses a new theme.

I like this. It gives library staff a chance to stop and focus, in depth, on the books and other resources we hold on particular topics.

It also gives us a chance to tell our customers about those resources.

In the fall, our theme was homework help.

This season, our theme is projects. I have to admit that the very word "project," and also the words "craft" and "knitting," fill me with a feeling of profound anxiety that I find difficult to shake.

The feelings are directly connected to a bag of wool that hides in the back of my closet. The wool is beautiful; it is off-white, with subtly coloured flecks, and it still smells like sheep.

It certainly has never done anything wrong, but my anxiety persists. This same bag of wool also gives my daughter a strange power; she can make me wince by simply uttering the word "sweater" and casting her eyes in the direction of the closet.

I have to backtrack just a little. The bag of wool is really not just a bag of wool. It's a bag that contains the aforementioned wool, some knitting needles, a pattern, the entire front of a sweater, and a left sleeve up to the elbow.

I started knitting the sweater a few months before my daughter's 12th birthday; she is now 23. The bag has been overseas and back again twice, and the pattern is out of style.

Most of us have a similar bag of wool. Your particular bag of wool might actually be the deck you meant to build three summers ago; the cake you wanted to learn how to make for your friend's wedding; the French cookbook you meant to work through, A to Z; the old car in your garage that still won't start; the language you never learned; the classics you still haven't read or the broken fireplace tiles that are still, after seven years, sitting in a small cardboard box on the hearth.

You will recognize your bag of wool by the troublesome feeling it produces in the pit of your stomach and by the way your family members roll their eyes whenever it is mentioned.

I decided on the first day of January that I wouldn't be able to live with myself for another year if I didn't complete the sweater.

I realize that, by telling you this, I'm putting even more pressure on myself.

"There goes that librarian," you will say, "who has taken 11 years to knit her daughter a sweater," while you make a mental note to demand proof of its completion by December 31st.

I will tell you, nonetheless, because while I was refreshing my memory on our project-related resources, I stumbled by chance upon an inspiringly bright knitting magazine; several beautiful knitting books, complete with patterns; three or four how-to-knit DVDs and a database with clear instructions on all the stitches and finishing methods that I've forgotten.

This inspired me to face my bag of wool, and I feel so much better. I've chosen a new pattern already and, although I haven't started knitting yet, I did take the bag out of the closet this morning.

I can almost look directly at it. The point I want to make is that when you're ready to face your project demons head on, or even if you're one of those admirable but rare people who don't have bags of wool in their closets and who look askance at the rest of us, the library is a great place to turn for help and resources for your next project.

And while you're in the library finding the French cookbook, the language-learning CDs, the carrepair database, the cake-decorating manual or information on how to repair your fireplace, pick up our new program guide, or get your tickets for the Maple Ridge Friends of the Library Quiz Night, coming up on Feb. 25.

Jo-Ann Sleiman is a librarian at the Maple Ridge Library

Special to The TIMES