Crumbs, rats, darn it! My knitting disaster

I love to knit. I wouldn’t say I’m super Nana standard, but I knit well enough to totally enjoy it and to make the kids lovely treasures. I also knit well enough to experience minimal faux pas.
Until now.

When my mother-in-law’s kids were still in nappies in Belfast, all she did was knit. It was cheap to knit, it was stylish to knit, it was fun to knit. It was noice. Normal. It was like therapy. Women would stand at the front gate with a baby hanging off one leg and knitting in hand. They would knit whilst stirring the pot for dinner, for goodness sake. These were knitters.

I started knitting around 6 or 7 years old, the same time my daughter Ella started. I loved it. Meditative, relaxing, super-rewarding. I did a lot of knitting when yarn was cheap but when knitting became trendier, it suddenly seemed ridiculously expensive to dig out the needles and start clicking.

I remember buying pure wool balls to make Ella a cardigan at 3 years old. It cost me $80 and I only needed a few balls. As the kids got older and their requirements for more balls of wool increased, I sort of lost interest because of the cost.

Yarn in Beijing is amazingly cheap, so I was delighted to pick up a lot of gorgeous bales before leaving. My absolute favourite is the wool/cashmere yarn (Australian, ironically) I bought for a song – smooth, soft, pliable, delicious.

I grabbed one of my Debbie Bliss knitting tomes and off I went – starting on a pale grey anorak for Ella.

Then moving home to Aus got in the way and I left the needles idle.

Just last week, I picked up the needles again and knitted about 40 rows. It wasn’t until I started decreasing that I realised I had almost a third too many stitches on my needles.

How this happened, I will never know – I’m normally fastidious with following patterns… but I was devastated to realise that somewhere along the line, things went awry (maybe it was moving to Australia from Beijing – if anything can scramble a knitter’s pattern-following capabilities, this would be it).

Anyway, I put the needles down last night and sighed, passing all that hard work over and over in my hands. Husband asked what was wrong and I just couldn’t even speak. So disappointing. So time wasting.

I’ll shelve the needles for a week then start unravelling.

I’m not one to shirk from a challenge, after all.

Do you think I can get this gorgeous creation done by (Australian) winter??? Stay tuned...