I'm BAAAAAACK

Hi everybody

I know, I haven’t been posting in a very long time. I’ve been away far too long but I’m back in a Norma Desmond-like sweep of strings and wind instruments. See the truth is.. and I’m a little ashamed to admit I’ve had to reconsider a couple of major relationships In my life lately, and I’ve come to the conclusion that It’s not me, It’s them.

It’s not just a simple case of start-itis. We all get that from time to time. Starting an epic crap-ton of projects and eventually finishing them ( even if you have to reincarnate to finish the amount of projects you’ve cast-on or chained, or Fsc/Fhdc/Fdc’d.  I’m convinced Shirley MacLaine is just a slow yarncrafter)  It’s  more like..well.. this is what happened

I was sitting in a local coffeehouse working on a project, and working this row where I’m supposed to work x number of stitches into a cluster, then chain a certain amount, then work another cluster of stitches into the next cluster. And I was coming up one cluster short. I checked my chart ( I don’t like written instructions and much prefer charts since I can slip them into a page protector and stick them into my murse. That’s right; I carry a man-purse. ) The problem evidently is that the cluster that was THREE GOD DAMN ROWS DOWN vanished from existence and evidently occupies the same frame of reality as the Island of Avalon, the Island on Lost, and the Island of Misfit Toys. The Island of Misfit stitches is where all your missing crochet stitches go. They slip in through quantum wormholes when you are not looking and hang out on this tropical location sunning themselves and drinking themselves silly on mojitos until they relax so much that if and when they ever do decide to reappear on your project, your gauge has now gone all catty-whompus.  Or perhaps that’s what the number sequence was on the Dharma computer was, it wasn’t actually the combination to the island or whatever ( hell it was Lost, nothing was what it was supposed to be) it was the stitch and row co-ordinates to all your missing crochet!

So now I’m faced with a few choices, rip out a hundred yards of crochet, in public, on lace weight cotton thread, with coffee dangerously close to my yarn, OR curse effectively and creatively in public in various languages, OR  send the shawl to the naughty projects bag until it has learned its lesson. The shawl and I were obviously having a major fight, and I don’t like to make a scene in public. And trust me, the sight of a six foot plus, two hundred and XXX pound bald man in glasses cussing in French, Russian, Sicilian, and Cantonese at the top of his lungs as he rips out five hundred blankety-blankety-blanking crochet stitches is VERY MUCH  the definition of making a scene in public.

So I packed up the crochet, and when I got home, it went into my naughty projects bag. The Naughty Projects Bag is sort of like the naughty chair for your kids or the Naughty room for the cat. (Yes, my cat goes to the Naughty Room when he’s a bad boy, it looks remarkably like my cellar) It’s not an effective discipline tool for felines (as my cellar door will attest, it looks like the victim of veeery tiny zombies clawing at it in search of smurf brains) but the Naughty Bag is very useful for disciplining bad projects. It goes in the bag and I start another project or three until the project in the Naughty Bag tells me it is sorry and gives me back my missing stitches.  Then I give it a hug and finish the job.

FYI.. the shawl’s still in the damn bag. The stitches are having too much fun on the Island.