Just Say No To Dental Floss In Your Knitting Bag

I’ve read in a few knitting books that dental floss can be a helpful tool in knitting.  One thing you can do with it is thread it through a row of knitting so when you rip several rows it will stop at that point.  Pretty handy, huh?  I thought so too, so I threw some floss in my knitting bag.  In July on the way back from my son’s out-of-town baseball game I came to the point where I wanted to stop on sock #1 and begin sock #2 (because nothing is worse than finishing one sock and still having an entire sock to knit-SSS-Second Sock Syndrome).  It would have been no big deal if I’d had another pair of #1 forty inch circulars with me. I had prime car knit time ahead of me and was desperately trying to come up with a solution.  Finally, I realized I had dental floss in my bag.  Whoo-hoo!  I didn’t have a tapestry needle with me, but I carefully slipped the stitches (all eighty of them) onto the floss and considered myself the most clever knitter on the planet as I cast on the new sock.  Pure genius. 

I continued to think this had worked beautifully until this past Sunday evening when I returned to sock #1 to put them back on the needles.  It never occured to me that the stitches would slip down and be nearly impossible to slip on the needles.  The first stitch was fine, then the tension of that stitch made the next few impossible to pick up.  I ended up with a small safety pin probing and searching for the stitch to no avail.  What finally sort-of worked was instead of picking them up in order I went at them from the other direction since there was no tension on that end of stitches.  So if I already had stitch 1 on the needle I picked up stitches 5,4,3,2 then slipped them on, making sure they weren’t twisted.  Unfortunatly it took me about 54 stitches and 40 minutes to figure this out. UGH!  I spent an entire hour messing with those stupid stitches and annoying floss while watching City of Angels (is Nicholas Cage hot or what in that flick?). 

So ladies, take my advice, use floss wisely in your knitting.  It may have saved me in a pinch but it so wasn’t worth an entire hour of my time undoing the mess I’d made. 

Moral of the story:  when you buy sock needles, buy enough to knit both socks at once.

When Did This Happen?

Have you ever been in the middle of doing something you never, ever thought you would be capable of doing, something that if in high school someone told you that someday you’d be doing it, you’d say, “NO FREAKING WAY AM I EVER DOING THAT” .  This happened to me today and the first thought in my head was “Holy shit, I’m a grown-up, did I miss a memo or what? “   Are you dying of curiousity yet? 

I was teaching a scrapbook class to about twenty women at a local church.  This was such a difficult committment for me to make to begin with.  I hate being up in front of people, I hate being the person in charge of things, it’s just not a comfy place for me.  But midway through I thought, “How did I get here?  This is so bizarre.  Boy did I buffalo them into thinking I know what the hell I’m doing!”  (the last time I had that thought was when I found myself working in a bank, WTF?)

I think no matter what I do in my life, I’ll always feel like that, that I’m a little kid playing in grown-up clothes. My biggest fear: that my kids will figure out that I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing in parenting.  My oldest has nearly figured it out.  Yikes.  Good parenting advice: never let them see you sweat.  Oh yeah, that was a right guard ad, but it still applies.  Act like you know what you’re doing and most people will not question it.  I first learned this while trying to sneak into bars with my older brother .  If you act sheepish you’ll get caught every time.   Keep your head up and keep walking.  Order your beer, sit down and shut up.   Amen.