A Little Sock Tale

It seems that every year when the seasons change in the fall, I fall prey to a cold.  And that's what's happened again.  Arghhh!!!  So, I decided to make the best of it and rest and knit. I had started those oyster tweed socks and so I knit, napped, and knit. I usually don't have much problem with socks because I've knit so many of them at this point (about a dozen pair over the years which equals twenty four individual socks), but this sock was soon to become my nemesis.  

Saturday night I thought I'd reached the spot to begin decreasing for the toe, so I began the process.  I stayed home from church yesterday because I didn't want to infect anyone, and besides, I had no voice.  As I continued my decreasing, I suddenly realized the sock looked a little short.  What?!?  I grabbed a previously knit sock to compare and sure enough, I'd started an inch too soon.  Nothing for it but to pull out all four needles and unravel, hoping I could catch all my stitches back up onto the needles.  It took some doing, and I can tell (but hopefully no one else will be able to), but I was finally able to get back to knitting round and round, for that extra inch.

Last night, Dan was gone for a while and I was back to decreasing, and almost to the end, when a stitch slipped off the needle and defied my attempt to get it back on, instead running down a row or two, taking some decreases with it.  Nothing to do but rip back a few rows again.  And in the process of picking up my needles to put the stitches back on, one fell through the crack between cushions on the sofa.  Oh no!!  

You see, our sofa and loveseat are both Lazy Boys and that means they are recliners.  I'm guessing the sofa weighs several hundred pounds, and it sits right down on the ground, no legs.  In front of it sits our big coffee table, which has drawers in it full of books and CDs (I know, why?  We haven't played them in years, but...).  All this to say that the coffee table is very hard to move.  I managed to get the end by the lost needle shoved a little way from the sofa, activated the recliner, and with a flashlight in hand, got down on the floor to start looking.  And I could see nothing but a lot of mechanical pieces.  I attempted to crawl back out of my little space and for a brief moment thought I was stuck, but I made it.  I left the flashlight on and tried peering down between the cushions from above and finally saw what I thought was the needle.  The crack was far too tight for my hand to reach through.  

I had an idea though.  Dan has a magnet on the end of a swivel handle for jobs such as this so I headed down to his workshop to fetch it where I could not find it.  Forced to admit defeat, I went back to the sock and was able to thread all the stitches back onto the four needles I had left, and then waited for Dan to get home. I couldn't actually knit because I needed that fifth needle.  (I do admit to some, um, frustration over this whole little fiasco.)

Well, needless to say, my hero arrived home, found the magnet thingy, moved the coffee table further out, and was able to retrieve the needle.  I carefully finished up the knitting and decided to leave the last, harrowing (at least for me) grafting of the ends using the Kitchener stitch until this morning.  

Such an innocent looking sock, and its friend, the crack.

I'm blaming the whole episode on my cold and my fuzzy head. (Cue Meg Ryan saying to Tom Hanks in You've Got Mail, that she has a cold and, "My head's all fuzzy.")  That's my story and I'm sticking to it. I have started the mate.  Apparently I'm a glutton for punishment.  Cough.  Cough, cough.