Mossy Cottage Knits

The Ultimate Revenge

The Flower Basket Shawl (or FBS, as the cool people say, and I do so desperately want to be cool) has been going well and will be done long before the 1.5 years it took to knit Olympic Squirrel, maybe even by this weekend, a year and four months ahead of schedule. Other than requiring a lot of counting to make sure one didn’t leave out a yarnover—and 99.9% of the time discovering that, yes, one did leave out a yarnover—it’s truly a breeze. (This has also had an unexpected side-effect which is that my Ravelry "Favorites” queue is now bulging with lace shawl patterns. Which is even odder considering I’m not all that fond of shawls and have no intention of allowing the FBS or anything similar to besmirch my virgin shoulders. I realize this is the knitting equivalent of buying the expensive ingredients for and cooking a fancy gourmet meal and then chucking the entire thing into the garbage can but, meh.)

Then came Monday and Tuesday. [Imagine I’m making the sound of screeching brakes here.] The wrong-side purling of something like 300 stitches resulted in my developing The Claw accompanied by some mysterious pain that ran the length of my forearm. Okay, not really mysterious. If, even without needles and yarn, I “air knit”—like playing air guitar, only different—and made a purling motion with said arm…yeah.

Then, sensing I was weak and falling behind the herd, the cats got into the act. Having to hide the knapsack every night from the zipper-opening demons—and then not being able to remember where I had put it in the morning—was getting old, so I had experimentally been leaving it out again. For a week or so, everything went tickety-boo until Tuesday when they unzipped the entire thing from one side to the other—not just a paw-sized hole, all they really needed; they unzipped The Entire Thing—and went rooting about to see what they could find. Fortunately, yarn-wise, they zeroed in on two relatively useless-to-me half-balls of cotton yarn which they just muddled about half-heartedly on the floor and which I, upon discovering this in the morning, picked up and threw away. Needle-wise, though, they found one of the needles of the FBS and chewed the tip just enough for it to be snaggy, just enough to put it on the disabled list. Here, however, is where my sweet, sweet revenge came in. What the cats didn’t know is I have two sets of Denise Interchangeables. Two. Meaning I have four size 6 needles. Imagine, if you will, the looks of smugness on their faces being replaced by looks of surprise, horror, frustration and defeat, as I unscrewed the damaged needle and slapped on a fresh one*. I believe I actually said “neener, neener” out loud to them.

I win.

* This will make sense to Red Dwarfers only, but I’ve been watching Red Dwarf for my FBS knitting entertainment. While I was swapping the two needles out, my brain was thinking, “Remove Spare Head 1; replace with Spare Head 2.”