Westport Yarns

I was watching the movie “King Arthur” the other day, the one with Clive Owen and Kiera Knightly. Kiera plays a reinvented, warrior Guinevere, one who can brandish a broad sword, shoot arrows with deadly accuracy, and snarl in the face of the enemy all the while looking like she stepped off the runway of a Thierry Mugler fashion show.

If you are wondering at this point what the heck this has to do with knitting, hang with me here.

As totally implausible as the movie’s scenario was it got me thinking: do I have that kind of steel core,  could I too laugh in the face of danger? I had to be honest with myself. I have a spine of tapioca, which has me cowering in the face of most challenging situations.

Most.

When it comes to knitting I am as intrepid as Amelia Earhart and Sir Edmund Hillary combined. This has been true since the beginning. I have never said “I can’t do that”. I may have said “I don’t want to do that” or “Wow, that looks hard” but I have never let the difficulty of a pattern daunt me. That’s the fun stuff about knitting, whether it’s cables or colorwork or stitch mania (hello Jane Elliott!) there are so many areas to explore. I really find it hard to believe people who have only done scarves, endless scarves. Jump in! Try something new! Stretch yourself! As much as we love it, we have to be able to say to ourselves “It’s only knitting”. What’s the worst that can happen? You would have to rip it out. Some people look at that as a waste of time but everything is a learning experience and just because you ripped something out once doesn’t mean you will rip it out again. Plus you’ve added to your experience level, which you can now apply to yet another project.

So brandish those needles! Stare that pattern down! Laugh in the face of short rows! Because we want the end of this story to read

“And they all knit happily ever after”.

-Julie

There are natural disasters and manmade disasters but no disaster hits so close to home as a knitting disaster. One such disaster recently happened to me involving a travel mug, what seemed to be an inordinate amount of coffee for said mug to contain (was there a secret compartment in the darned thing?), and knitting bag.

In an effort to save money and avoid donut temptation (much to the chagrin of the local DD franchise) I was determined to bring my own coffee to work. I had a travel mug that my thoughtful husband had bought me but as usual he had bought the most high tech one he could find, which meant that it defied my attempts to screw the top on or off on several occasions. I had just had such an occasion where it took a snow drift, boiling water and the best muscular efforts of my husband and son to remove the lid. So the next time I took out the mug I made sure that I screwed the lid on just tightly enough so that I didn’t have to detonate the lid to get at my coffee.

As happens, the next time I took the travel mug to work the day was over before I have even finshed a quarter of the contents. So when it came time to leave I tightened the lid and threw it in my knitting bag.

Here’s a tip: never throw a travel mug full of coffee, no matter how supposedly trustworthy the mug, into a knitting bag.

When I got home I found that this time I had not twisted the lid tightly enough so that in the space of the 10 minutes it took me to drive home the coffee had filled my entire knitting bag. In case you don’t understand the repercussions, this meant 5 SKEINS OF HAND-DYED YARN SOAKED WITH COFFEE, including a couple that had already been wound into balls and some of which was ALREADY KNIT. So there I was ripping, unwinding, soaking, and winding around hangers to dry approximately 1500 yards of yarn, (that’s almost a mile of yarn, people!) all accompanied by – shall we say - colorful language. My kids hid in their rooms and my husband skipped the glass and simply handed me the bottle of wine.

Well, I’m not sure all the coffee came out but the yarn was a brown-based variegated to begin with so no harm done. The new gray hairs can be dealt with and the burst blood vessels have healed and I have learned a very valuable lesson:

Don’t try to save money.

P.S. lest you think Pam was dumb enough to throw a travel mug full of coffee into a knitting bag this post was written by Julie