This Child

This evil child!

The one who took a bath at two and managed to be filthy with stuff in her hair by six.

Who posed for one picture then hid her face from the camera.

She just might be the death of me.

I was quietly knitting away on my Knitpicks project of which I am forbidden to speak when I noticed it. I'll admit, I'm fussy about my knitting. I've learned to rip what I hate with minimal whining and take the time to re-knit. Trust me, the whining factor while ripping is significantly smaller then when I try to ignore the mistake and live with it. And that's just for the stuff I'm fiddling around with for me. Imagine how much higher the fuss factor is when I'm knitting for someone else?!!!! I won't lie to you. It's pretty bad.

So I was quietly knitting away when I realized I did not like the way I joined the new ball of yarn. I used one technique and thought maybe a different one would be a better idea. Unfortunately I was four inches away from the join before I noticed the join was having problems (I was distracted, I'll tell you about that tomorrow). With a sigh I settled myself on my bed to rip it. Sweet Pea settled herself beside me.

She babbled and giggled and basically we had a good time talking together. I ripped back to the offending join and rolled the newly freed crinkly yarn back into a ball. I set about putting the stitches back on the needles so I could commence knitting once again, this time with a superior join. It took some time to carefully place all my stitches back on the needle. Sweet Pea continued to babble, and giggle and be cute. I continued to be distracted by the project and by my mysterious distraction.

When I finally returned all the stitches to the needle and was ready to re-execute the join I realized what Sweet Pea had been so happily doing while I was so distracted. She was unwinding my newly wound yarn. *sigh*

She grinned at me over the pile of yarn barf she had created.

I died a little inside as I reached to take the ball and rewind it back into a usable form.

For the most part it wasn't too bad, until I got to the end.

At the end was a yarn snarl like no yarn snarl ever seen before.

Sure, it doesn't look so big and bad in the picture (why are some things so photogenic?), but believe me, it was a PITA.

I contemplated cutting it off, throwing it away, and never speaking of it again. Surely what that move would save me in frustration would actually add years to my life. I mentally tried to calculate the amount of yarn I had and the amount of yarn needed to finish the project. Would the yarn contained in the snarl be the difference between a pristine finished object and me writing apologetic e-mails to Knitpicks pleading for more yarn?

Better safe than groveling.

I unpicked the entire snarl of yarn barf. I won't even tell you how long it took.

Somedays she's lucky she's so cute.

It's the only thing that keeps her alive.