My super secret squirrel knitting fell by the wayside due to persistent health problems. Knitting in general fell by the wayside and last year I managed to knit:
one stonington shawl aka baby blanket
one baby surprise jacket with matching socks
2 pairs of man sized socks for the beloved one
an eternity scarf for my niece’s Christmas gift
a pair of beaded wristers for a secret spoilee
and 2 shawls for myself: inky-dinky spider and vostok
Looking over I didn’t do as badly as I had thought.
Did I share the disaster that struck me during the baby blanket knitting? Well, as usual, I could not find my chibi. I swear I have purchased a zillionty chibis over the years and can never find one! Isn’t that almost always the case when it comes to notions? Please don’t let it just be me. So I did a russian graft, as best as I could remember it, without having set up for such a thing and determined the seam to be too heavy and obvious. I showed the baby blanket to mama and she couldn’t tell but you know how it is with knitters~ we can always see our own mistakes even if the non-knitterly types cannot. I kept the blanket for another month until I got my tushie into gear and purchased some more chibis then set about undoing my graft, picking up and fixing the inevitable dropped stitches from undoing the graft, reknit a few rows then performed a proper graft. As proper as I am able… my grafts never actually duplicate the knitted gauge but such is life. Then I pridefully showed my beloved the vastly improved seam and turned the shawl this way and that way for admiration. I even showed it to the mama and told her I would wash it and give it to her in 4 days time.
Sounds not very much disasterly does it? But wait! I put the shawl into the sinkful of sudsy water, let it soak a few hours, rinsed and set it out to dry and there was a huge honking hole near one corner. The size of a silver dollar if anybody else remembers those things. And it made no sense at all because just 2 days previously I had been showing off my fabulous proper graft. So then I go to find the remaining yarn, all of which was donated if you recall, and it looks like a pom-pom there are so many little breaks all over the place. Horrors! My first bug infestation. At least that is all I can figure it that in the 9 months since the yarn arrived little eggs had hatched and larvae had eaten their way out of the ball and the corner of my shawl. I did not take pictures. I panicked. Seriously in over 30 yrs of knitting I had never seen a moth {found a dead one in box} or a carpet beetle {found a dead one in same box} or a creepy crawly wormy looking larvae {found one wiggling its way along my precious yarn in same box} At least it seemed contained but I have been inspecting and microwaving balls and hanks of yarn like crazy since just before Thanksgiving.
Anyway it all ended well and good if you ask me. Since I did not have any of the original yarn to fix the amazingly huge hole, or rather I did not feel like risking it and threw away all of that yarn I had left, I settled for another EZ pattern namely the heart patch. I made two patches and stitched them over the hole, one per side. The result is charming if you ask me. The mama agrees:
