I was happily knitting along on Kiri last night after the debacle of the day before, and looked down to see, yes, you guessed it, a dropped stitch. Sigh. It hadn’t really gone anywhere. Thank goodness. The fuzziness of the yarn stopped it before it did, but it was far enough down there to cause a serious disruption. I’d ignorantly knitted up several rows above it, blissfully unaware. I caught it up in a short piece of red sock yarn—what a sight!—to prevent it from continuing its journey down my knitting, until I could get to it. And, of course, its path is complicated by a series of SKPSSOs. So, I knit up to the stitch in question, dropped the perfectly good stitch from the needle, and proceeded to try to finagle the dropped stitch into submission. Ha. Way too dark over on my side of the couch for this sort of intricate work. I moved over to the hearth, sat myself down on the bricks right under the floor lamp, and tried again. Nope. Still can’t see those little buggers well enough. Got up, got a piece of white paper, put it on my lap. Ah ha! Now I can see you guys. But now the circular needles are getting in my way. They absolutely refused to cooperate.

Oh, Dear, come over here, please. I need your help.

But I don’t know anything about knitting.

It’s alright, Dear, you don’t have to. Just put your finger here…

So, there’s Dave kneeling at my feet—a delightful sight, if I do say so—holding the recalcitrant needles in place on my lap with his index finger, while I use a slightly-too-big-for-the-job crochet hook and the aforementioned piece of red sock yarn to “knit” up the stitches that were by now badly mangled.

Watching me at my work, Dave accused me of knowing way too much about how knitting stitches are formed.

But it’s all your fault, you know.

Huh?

It’s that sweater I knit for you. The Aran.

There were a number of times when knitting that thing—each side was 200 stitches across, all cables, size 4 needles, knit with Rowan’s Cotton Glace in ecru—that I’d see a place where I’d crossed a cable the wrong way, a couple inches below me. After all I’d been through with that sweater (it took three years to knit, start to finish), I wasn’t about to tear out several inches of 200-stitch rows just to fix one little cable cross. So I taught myself how to drop the stitches in the offending area, and re-do them with a crochet hook, correcting the mis-knit cable crosses in the meantime. But I digress…

Ah. Okay. I see.

Part way through my exploits, Dave suggested that he go to the garage and get a wire-tie to hold my needles together so he wouldn’t have to hold them. Please.

No, thank you, Dear. I’m almost done. There. You can let go now. Thank you.

Finally, back on the couch. Knitting happily away again. This time I think I have everything done. No more dropped stitches or horribly mangled decreases. I hope. We’ll see. I’ll be working on it again tonight…