A few hours ago I was feeling victorious.
My mother taught me how to knit some time around 1981. By that point I had been needlepointing, I think, and maybe even embroidering, and she taught me how to knit as a next step. I liked to knit but stopped for good when the purple scarf I was making for myself somehow became a trapezoid instead of a rectangle. As some sort of consolation prize, Mom promised to make my "scarf" into a dress for Barbie (no, I really didn't get very far). It was a switch I insisted on not so much because Barbie was in need, but because it meant that I wouldn't have failed. Project conquered: dress completed (it was always meant to be a dress, I swear). Needles down.
Over the last, what, ten years?, knitting shops have popped up in all of the least likely places. You all know this. Knitting is cool again! And for a while I've been walking in and out of yarn stores the way I once walked in and out of fancy paper stores, ogling at the selection and touching pretty much everything. So now that I'm old and mature and not working all night and all day, starting to knit again would be a good way to counteract all the television I've been watching. It's productive! It will engage my inner (and outer) perfectionist! What could be bad?
This weekend in a knitting store I spotted some nice yarn that was discontinued (so it was super cheap!) sitting next to a simple-looking sample scarf. Perfect perfect perfect. I'll take it. But there was no time for mom to cast on the yarn while she was here (like when I was little and I couldn't bite into an apple unless she bit it first) but that was no problem. I have the internet, and the internet will teach me the mysterious ways of the knitting gods. I can learn. And I am patient. And I am an adult.
Except knitting is hard, and I have the frustration threshold of a highly aggravated three-year-old.
There was going to be a triumphant photo up here to show you: a successfully started scarf with stitches lined up all in one or two lovely rows. Just like ducks! I'd have this scarf all ready to go by, say, next Christmas for sure. But it was not meant to be. Instead, I sat on the couch concentrating intensely on my needles as I slowly and carefully cast on five individual stitches (accompanied by only mild yelling) . I'm not sure I can stress to you the extent to which I resembled my six-year-old self with my slow, purposeful moves. But the five lovely (and, at least, identical) stitches didn't look quite right, so I put the needles down and waited for my mother to call me back before I got any further. Her sage advice was that it didn't matter -- as long as the stitches stayed together, it would be fine for me and my soon-to-be-scarf. OK, no problem. That's when it all went horribly wrong, the screaming got worse, and the stitches got pulled out.
... and you don't even get the picture of me knitting when I was six, which is somewhere in New Jersey and not available to be scanned.
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