Dave thinks the lovely taupe color of this yarn looks like dust bunnies. Especially from a distance. Especially when the knitting is bunched up and small, like it is now.

Yes, you heard me say, “Small, like it is now.”

This is because all that lovely knitting that I showed you the other day is gone. All 15,200 stitches and 480 beads. Gone. With a simple pull of the thread.

It’s a bit of a shocker, isn’t it?

When I got up on Tuesday morning I was quite happy with my project, and was until I photographed it for the blog. But things showed up in the photos that are hard to see in real life, and my disappointment grew. Thinking that I could ignore the warning signs, I actually knit at it in the afternoon. The dissatisfaction reached its peak around 5 pm. Okay. It’s got to come out. Those beads simply will not do.

The only problem at that point was how to frog the thing—not the lace, I’ve done that plenty of times before, that part’s a simple matter—but how to safely disengage that many beads without losing half of them. Or more.

Dave had a fabulous idea at this point. Put the knitting in a bag, close the bag up so that only one strand of yarn can come through the hole, then pull. So we tried it. I got a large ziplock bag, stuffed the knitting into it, zipped it up, held my breath, and pulled. You know what? It worked really well. It wouldn’t work this well on all yarns, but this one unravels so cleanly that it did just fine. The beads popped off as the frogging got to them, and they danced around safely inside the bag. In a sad, bizarre, frustrating way it was actually sort of fun.

All I can say is that it’s a very good thing that I enjoy knitting.

I spent the rest of the evening casting on again. You know what? It takes a while to cast on 419 stitches. And to count them—multiple times—to ensure that the correct number of stitches are on the needle.

Yesterday I started actually knitting again. So now, instead of having 38 rows and almost 500 beads attached to my project, I have 9 rows and no beads. The beading will resume with row 11. In case you’re wondering, no, I’m not going to use black beads. Two reasons: I don’t have enough—this project requires a lot of beads—and it turns out I have another lovely dark color that has a little more bling than black, and looks ever so much nicer on this lovely taupe yarn.

The tiny swatch on the left is my experiment with black beads. They work (though Dave will argue this point), but they’re nothing special. The other beads I have in mind are much, much prettier on this yarn.

I had an adorable furry helper this morning for my photo shoot. She even let me zoom in on her pretty little face. I love her expression. She rarely even sniffs at the camera any more. Instead she’s all, “Mom…”

On another note entirely, we have a little volunteer plant that we’re nurturing. No idea what it is. I’m embarrassed to admit where it was growing. It all comes down to screwy plumbing. No, really. It does. Whoever plumbed our kitchen was either sick, demented, or had absolutely no idea what he was doing. It twists and turns and bends every which way, with the result that if we regularly use the garbage disposal for, you know, all the normal stuff, it inevitably backs up. On a holiday. When we’re in the middle of cooking, cleaning, and preparing to have a lovely meal. Right. You can see the problem.

At one point Dave invested in a really, really long snake to clean it out with. Really long. That really long snake barely reaches some of the clogs. It’s a nightmare. Much swearing and many days are normally involved in de-clogging the sink. It’s so painful that we have all but given up on the garbage disposal. These days, for the most part, only the smallest of plate scrapings go down the drain. Because of this, the disposal isn’t run every day. There’s just no need.

I’m sure you can see where this is going.

When I was at Mom’s Dave came up one morning to make coffee, get his breakfast, and happened to look in the sink. It’s a pretty normal thing to do, right? This particular morning, however, he did a bit of a double take. There was a plant, a seedling, growing up out of the garbage disposal.

Instead of running the disposal, he got one of my tiny pots and a pretty little saucer out of the garage, found some potting soil, carefully pulled the seedling out of the sink, and planted it. It’s been growing happily on our windowsill ever since.

The only real problem at this point is that we have absolutely no idea what this baby plant is.

The normal things to go down the drain are tiny, tomato seeds, bell pepper seeds, things like that. We talked about what he’d been eating, and there was nary a cucumber nor a grape, neither an apple seed nor watermelon. The little plant remains a mystery. Do you know what it might be?