Don’t Drink & Knit

I’m only going to confess that it was three Pimm’s Cups because two friends who both read my blog walked into the restaurant long after the point where we had gone from being a respectable, well-behaved foursome for dinner and had reached the point where we were laughing loudly at each other’s jokes and completing each other’s sentences.

For some reason, I thought the drive home was a good time to work on the sleeves for the baby sweater — the darling pink one being knit out of Plymouth’s Royal Bamboo with the trim in Filatura di Crosa Baby Bon Bon.  I was whipping through the rows, with both sleeves on a single needle, when suddenly, disaster struck.  Bamboo is slippery to work with and in my lightening fast, self- confident Pimm’s girl mode, I suddenly slipped seven or eight stitches off the needles for no discernable reason.  And then, oh the horror of it, through one of the mysteries of knitting I haven’t yet mastered, one of the dropped stitches began to run like a cheap pair of panthoses.  To make matters worse, I was on the dreaded purl side of the sleeves.

I briefly contemplated pretending it hadn’t happened, wondering if I could delude myself into thinking I could hide it in the seam of the sleeve.  Clearly not.  I thought about trying to fix just the stitches, but, I have to confess, this is not my strong suit as a knitter and to make matters worse, the bamboo yarn, which gives new meaning to the concept of low twist, was degrading into 7 or 8 unimaginably thin strands as the stitches began to lose their beautiful, uniform stockinette patterning.

The only option was to frog.  It turned out to be seven rows to be exact, back past all the increases.  This, I might add, was a bit tricky because I had to make careful note of where the increases were and rip only the one sleeve, as both were on the same needle.  No problem.  The going got dicey when I realized I had to get all those little strands back into stitch form and onto the needles.  "Little soldiers leaning left" I kept murmuring  — a wonderful little ditty from the woman who owns my local yarn shop.  I finally settled for taking out a set of dpns and coaxing five or six little stitches onto each of them, picking up and sorting out strands.  It seemed to be okay.  Really.  I knit the rows back, increases and all.  There was the bad moment when I realized the sleeve that was still on the needles was on the purl side and my resurrected sleeve was on the knit side, but that was easily fixed.

I carefully took photos at each stage of the process, thinking that if I ended up with a total ungodly freakin’ disaster on my hands a slight problem at the end, the pictures would be useful for sorting things out.  But, at the end, I realized I had been carefully taking those little pictures with no compact flash card in the camera, so no pictures.  It’s a good thing I didn’t need them, but I still say to you friends, don’t drink, at least not Pimm’s Cup, and knit.

In the event you have read this far, I can at least reward you with one small picture.  Here is the back and it’s sweet tiny fronts, ready to go together as soon as the sleeves are finished.