Through Yarn Colored Glasses...

Remember the other day when I was struggling to get through the Christmas prep and I mentioned how the memory of that stress would vanish with time? It happens every year. I am up to my elbows in flour and half-wrapped gifts and swearing that next Yuletide, I'll use this misuse of my time as a reminder to be better prepared for this event. Never again will I put everything off until the last second! Never! I even give some thought to writing these words of wisdom down somewhere so I'll see it all year long.

Then the holiday comes. I am exhausted and it passes in a blur, but my memories of it are tinged with a warm, golden glow. The bad stuff just...vanishes.

The Sheep Family had a lovely holiday. There was a bit of an incident with the ham, I'm afraid. There was every reason to believe that the piggy might be unfit for human consumption. However, Mommy and Daddy Sheep are nothing if not paragons of Teamwork In Parenting and handled the situation deftly. If the worst you can say about Christmas is that you got yummy chicken instead of yummy (and perhaps a little deadly) ham, then you have nothing over which to fuss.

It's like the hours spent with the last minute baking and tape wrangling never happened. Now that all that business is behind me, I find myself facing a vacation. I am in need of something to do to fill the empty hours now that I am without my students and their eager pursuit of knowledge. Whatever is a girl to do? Fortunately, I have a few things around here with which to keep myself entertained. In fact, I thought of a little something that I could finish up from last summer!

I had this sweater that I was working on. Everything was going swimmingly until I got the the part where I wanted to do a little Fair Isle. Not much. Just a little. To keep things interesting, you see...

There were issues. Not big ones. Little ones. I was just a tad off when it came to the stitch count and I needed to tink back a few rows to adjust the pattern. No biggie. But it was hot and school was soon to start. I didn't really have the patience for that kind of thing just then. I vividly recall thinking to myself, "I should just set this aside until I can give it my full attention. The fixes are simple, but we want to make sure we are in the zone. Otherwise, we might make a mess of things! Gosh, I sure am an amazing person to have made such a responsible decision."

Apparently, the glitch in the brain that lets you remember holidays as made-for-TV-movies also applies to knitting projects. Who knew?

I pulled the sweater out today and dutifully tinked back to a point where I could re-knit the yoke. That's when I realized that there were more problems going on with this thing than I remembered. The stitch count isn't even close to what I wrote down when I stuffed the sweater in the bag back in August. There is a mysterious hole in one of the sleeves but no dropped stitch that I can see. There is, however, evidence that I performed an inelegant repair at that spot so clearly I was aware of this mistake at some point. There are two strands of yarn looping from one side of the sweater to the other that appear to have no purpose whatsoever but which are firmly attached to the fabric.

I don't know exactly what happened here. Nor do I want to. Sometimes knitting is like Christmas. It's better if you think of it as having gone perfectly and then just show the pictures where no one is glaring at anyone else or falling face first into the eggnog. I'm forging ahead with the sweater as if nothing horrific happened. I'll wear it at home. Or take it out once a year to look at it and remember the happy days of knitting represented in each stitch.

It's better that way.

SA