Bone-headed bungle bites this bimbo in the butt (accidental frogging)…

I made the most bone-headed bungle of my entire knitting (or crocheting!) life this weekend.

I’ve been working on fingerless mitts I’m improvising from DROPS Alpaca that I picked up on close-out sale. It’s a soft blue that is the perfect color to go with my winter jacket (ski style). I completed one, even managed to improvise a thumb for it (rather than my usual gaping hole where a thumb ought to be), and it was absolutely beautiful. Lacy, but not so much that it sacrificed warmth. I made a 2nd one. Sadly, it didn’t match the first one, despite my best efforts. It was, perhaps, a row or two too long in the hand area, and a lace repeat to long on the thumb. And I only discovered this problem after I had woven in all of the ends. Growl! But that’s not the bone-headed part.

I decided that I liked the longer mitt/longer thumb, and so would frog the thumb on the first mitt and make it longer, and then maybe also add another row or two of ribbing at the top of it. I started with ripping the thumb, and frogged way too far. I did not figure out why the yarn wouldn’t come “un-done” all the way until I had half-way frogged out the increases that are in the middle of rounds in the middle of the length of the mitt. Oy vey! My only excuse was that I was pretty ticked off at almost my entire family at the time, hence, rather distracted. Don’t ask, not airing that dirty laundry here. Anyway I made what can only be called A Huge Mess of my perfectly lovely mitt. So, now I had to frog the whole thing.

I sat down to do that this evening, after a rather fraught day (again, don’t ask, same crap as above, different day). The husband, younger son and in-laws were all in the living room watching Jeff Dunham‘s Christmas special on DVD (just bought it today). And I was paying not enough attention to my frogging, due to a mixture of entertaining snippets in the Dunham special and my own inertia from my fraught weekend. So, I snipped the ending of the yarn out, and attempted to frog the mitt. Only, about 1.5″ in to frogging, I suddenly realized that I was frogging the wrong damned mitt! That’s right. I frogged the GOOD mitt. I can’t believe I did this. I saved the yarn, of course, it’s wound up, using my ball winder and ready to be re-knitted. I managed to rescue my stitches (plus a few extra, as I must have ripped down to a lace row, not a knit row), but it’s going to be a bit messy to get this back on track. 😦

Once I saw my error, got over the impulse to beat my head against the wall, and sat down to frog the correct mitt, things still did not go all that smoothly. I broke the yarn in one spot, trying to untangle it from itself. Managed to spit-splice that back together, but the yarn became hopelessly tangled once I started ripping around the part where I had screwed up ripping out the thumb. You would think that these long strands of floating yarn (ripped from the middle of a round, as noted above) would make the act of frogging easier. Not so. Huge knotty mess.

I give up. Obviously time to find something else to knit. But they were so pretty! Well, maybe tomorrow will bring my brain back into my head and I’ll be able to (a) finish frogging and (b) start over. 😦

On the “up side” (maybe), we did finish holiday shopping for 20 year old son this weekend, I got a little start on husband, and we thought we had finished the 13 year old son, but, as it turns out, the big/main gift we got him is something he’s decided he doesn’t really want. So back to the store it went to day. Unfortunately, I can’t really afford the thing he *does* want. So not sure where I’ll go with that. I think husband may finally have gotten my less-than-subtle hints about shopping on-line at Knit Picks (knitting books are generally a dead-on bargain from KP, and Harmony are my personal preference in DPNs…) and placed an order tonight. Or not. Hard to tell with him. I guess I’ll find out for sure when I open my gifts. Of course, husband knows that I know his password and username on KP’s website, since I set the account up for him in order to arrange an order for my birthday earlier this year. And I’m not particularly patient, so it’s going to take a lot of willpower for me to resist logging in to his account. 🙂