I Cannot Bear to Look

I knit my way down to the ankle on the Pretty Petals sock. I admired it in a way that quite possibly smacked of hubris. I can admit this now. I tucked it away and went to bed, confident that today would find me finishing the first sock and moving happily on to the next. No SSS for m, no siree Bob (does anyone know who this “Bob” character might be? Anyone? Well, never mind.). But you know, I got to looking at it….and…..

You see, the pattern is one of several given to me by a dear friend and all written by the same person (whose name escapes me, but I’m just too dreadfully lazy to shift the cat off my lap and go downstairs to look. Which is pathetic, I know, but there it is.). In another of these patterns, the designer suggests using “size 1 or 2 needles.” Apparently you get to choose. But the Pretty Petals pattern (say that 3 times fast) just says to use the 1’s. Which I did. In spite of my observation that 64 stitches on size 1 needles seemed a tad….small, and given that the recently deceased Pomotamus socks were something like 72 stitches on size 2’s (have I mentioned my belief that we knitters are, as a group, sometimes fatally optimistic?) I reasoned that the designer would probably know and it would be just fine and…..well. It looked smallish in the cold light of day. So I wrote to my dear friend to tell her what I’d done and to ask her what SHE’D done. She read my note, had a small heart attack on my behalf, and promptly reached for the telephone to tell me “2’s, Sweetie. I used 2’s.”

Well….crudmuffins. (I’m trying to clean up my language in honor of the new year. This should work out fine, provided the year doesn’t last more than a few days. And provided I don’t knit.)

I pondered this new information. Then I decided that I simply couldn’t bear to look at the possibly doomed sock in progress. Nope. Not today. I want to go another 12 hours believing that the knitting gods love me, the sock is perfect, and there are faeries in the garden. (That last part could be negotiated. I’m a somewhat reasonable woman.) So I sat down on the couch with a little cotton cardigan pattern and spent over half an hour casting on. This is not a level of snaildom that is easily accomplished, I’ll have you know. Nay, you have to be using an unusually splitty cotton yarn that insists on falling hysterically apart at the merest mention of the phrase “knitting needle” but that nevertheless is so lovely that Knitters Optimism can once again overtake reason (and choke the everloving…..er…doody out of it. So far so good on the language thing, eh?). I tried for some time before admitting defeat. Then I went upstairs, dug deeply into my stash and selected a lovely emerald green cotton. And sat down again to cast on, happily picturing possibly button choices, possible button band stitches. This is probably what ticked off the knitting gods. They hate it when I have hope. Oh, it cast on just fine, don’t get me wrong (you KNOW the gods are too creative to throw the same doody at me twice, don’t you?) and it even knit up into three rows just fine. Which is when I held it up….and realized that in order to have hips that would fill out the bright green bottom band of the sweater, I would also have to be the proud owner of a saddle and a bridle, and answer to “Flicka”. Or “Mister Ed”. Whatever. It was freaking huge.

Now I am seated upstairs avoiding all things cotton, woolen, or remotely pointy. It is my considered opinion that the good knitting fortune of the world is probably significantly higher tonight by the mere act of my abstaining from attempting to knit. If you’re currently working on a complicated lace pattern, you’re welcome.