Over the past two weeks working on the “small comfort” piece has become obsessive and on Sunday afternoon I had managed to get this far in the “Up and over vest” that I am making in hand-dyed yarn from YAK (in Brighton).
By Monday Lunch-time I was about 2.5 inches away from completing the piece when I noticed my ribbing, the last bit that I needed to do, was looking wrong. Slightly, towards one of the edges. With great trepidation, because unraveling scares the hell out of me, I watched some youtube videos on the subject and read up about it in my “Knitting Basics” book (did I mention I’m a beginner?) and then pushed a slightly smaller knitting needle several rows below the mistake through what I hoped were the right loops and along the correct row.
What a disaster! I can’t describe the mess that I ended up with: weird loops and stray ends of yarn appearing all along the mess of a row I now had. After looking at it and trying to puzzle it out for two hours, with the kind of grim determination that these catastrophes bring out in me, and my 9 year old daughter saying to me: Give it to me, Mummy, I can do it for you and me: much cursed mutterings under my breath, I acknowledged that it was time to put the knitting to one side and that maybe it was nature’s way telling me to do something else for a change.
So after putting the children to bed I blogged about the Alexander McQueen show that I’d seen on Friday (see previous post) and focused my attention on “Angel’s Nightie”: bought modroc and aluminum wire online and watched youtube videos about CAD for Costume construction and pattern cutting.
This morning, after school drop-off, I then took my ravaged knitting to Brighton’s wonderful YAK store in Gloucester Road (www.yarnandknitting.com) and to it’s owner, the equally wonderful Kate Metherell, who was able to salvage my knitting in no time at all, whilst I sat there in the calm of her shop, listening to the ticking of the clock, feeling anxious and eternally grateful.
So it’s Tuesday, the sun is shining again. I’m in my favourite cafe surrounded, on my right, by a man making notes on Henry Miller, and on my left, by a Woman making notes about the Vagina Monologues.
Tomorrow I want to write about the background to “Angel’s Nightie”, but I just needed to get the tangled wool out of my system today.
