Because we are a family of squirrels, the perfect buttons for my ridiculously green cardigan were stashed in my grandmother’s button box. They were affixed by the half-dozen to little yellowed cards with 10 cents stamped in the corner and “safe for washing!” printed reassuringly beneath. Not coated with water-soluble film that will stain all your clothes and poison your children, it tried hard to not to say. I committed a terrible crime against textile history by prying the buttons off the little rusty staples and sewing them onto my sweater; imagining them traveling from Guam to Indiana to Newfoundland before hitching a ride in my mother’s stash and following us through Arizona and Hawaii – waiting half a century for me to serendipitously knit a sweater in just exactly the right color.
When I finished it and buttoned it up, I expected to be transported a few inches off the ground in a fountain of golden light. I took a crappy phone picture to commemorate the moment.
So that was nice. And the whole thing was loaded with so much sentimental weight that I should have known better than to expect the next project to be anything other than a complete and face-raking failure.
These socks. Woe-socks. Socks so tormented, they are practically setting moors on fire and climbing roofs in their nighties.
Firstly, I knit three inches on the wrong needles, and the sock was too small to cram my hand into. Frogged it, cussing.
On my second attempt, I knit all the way down to the heel before realizing that my math was wrong – so while the cuff was now bigger than my wrist, the heel was narrow enough to fit my toddler.
At this point, I decided to plug stubbornly along anyway, thinking that it might somehow get bigger through denial and optimism. Got almost down to the toe and then struggled it onto my 6 year-old. Howled in anguish.
Frogging something this complicated usually requires a bit of crying and a glass of bourbon, but it was only 8:30am, so I just looked up at the ceiling and thought about photoshopping my MLIS degree to claim I minored in Morbid Bibliomancy while blindly unraveling the sock and winding it into a ball of crinkly ramen-yarn.
I have cast on for the third time. I will win, sock.
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