Sooooooooooo, I shelved the Six Socks for a few days, and now I’m making gloves. For myself. During this time when I should be focused on the Christmas knitting.
I am an excellent gift-giver, if I do say so myself.
More specifically, I’m making these gloves. Originally, I had spied a pair from “Last Minute Knitted Gifts” on one of my craft porn blogs, but after finally getting my mitts on a copy, I realized that I really wouldn’t be using the book for much more, and besides, Knitty knows everything, anyway, so why not just go there?
I went to Knitty.
There I found this fetching pair of gloves (called Fetching!), looked it over, and decided that I couldn’t possibly do it, because the pattern involves cabling. I told the Capt’n that there was no way in hell I could possibly pull it off, because I am a back-and-forth kind of girl.
“You knit with four needles,” he said, not even looking up from his painting project. “You make hats. You make more socks than the sock fairy, for God’s sake. You can do whatever it is you’re yammering about.”
(He pays attention to the headlines.)
And then he looked at the photograph of the finished project. “Woah. Okay, how do you do that?”
“I dunno,” I said, and at this point, I had read through the instructions three times. So I read them out loud to him, just to see if he had any ideas. He listened, making a thoughtful face and when I had finished, he said, “Well, I know what all of those words mean, but not in the particular order in which you read them. The way you read them? Nonsense.”
“Exactly.”
He looked over my shoulder to see if maybe he could put some of his brilliant engineering training to work deciphering the simple (okay, tangy) knitting instructions. He couldn’t. We called it a wash and went to bed.
Where I had cabling dreams. All night.
Well, hell, if I was going to dream about it, I might as well attempt it. I think I said as much to the Capt’n, using a piece of logic I like to call, “If I can graduate from college, I can to do X,” where X is anything from swapping the suspension on my car to making a pie crust.
Apparently, I can cable.
And because I was so proud, and very show-off-y (and in touch with my inner four-year-old), I demonstrated for the Capt’n.
“See, you do this and then you do this, and when you’ve finished, you’ve juggled five needles and swapped the position of those stitches with these stitches.”
The Capt’n, who has said that he sees knitting as one big knot-tying extravaganza, shook his head and said all he saw was a hot mess waiting to happen.
“So,” he said to me this morning as I was happily clicking away. “How do you do the thumb?”
Fuck.