"You sendin' the Wolf?"

In this case, my version of the Wolf today is my MIL. No dead bodies to hide or itty bitty bits of skull to pick up but had she not saved me that might have been the case because my head would have exploded. No need for Vincent Vega's gun to go off by accident.

I was sneaking in a bit of knitting on my Aibhlinn cowl before having to get on to some chores and that right there should have been a warning for me that disaster was looming just over the horizon. Any time I rush knit and am distracted I'll screw up and screw up I did. At least I'm consistant. The row I was on called for p3, k3 to the end of the row and as I neared the end of the row I realized I was going to end the row with p3.

Bring me a brick wall on which I can bang my head.

I started to unknit back to where I believed the error to be but in my rush to hurry and fix my mistake I didn't look at the stitches carefully enough. I knit forward again and noticed that I was still ending the row with p3. All my unknitting hadn't changed a thing.

Now panic is beginning to set in because I know the more I fool with it the more likely I am to bollocks up my work. Back to unknitting and now things are becoming a blur. I see now that where I got off pattern is waaaay back in the row and somehow I've lost a stich somewhere but I didn't seem to have dropped it.

Fuuuuuuuuuck!

I am now faced with not knowing where a stich is, I think I've got at least half of my stitches on the needle backwards and I know that unknitting back to where the original error is just going to create more. I am now faced with frogging over twelve inches and nearly three skeins worth of work - over three hundred meters of yarn - and starting all over again. Doing those damned bobbles again. After starting this piece five times now I am the expert bobbler but I'd like to do something else, thanks.

And yet in an ususual moment of clarity was able to stop my impulse to rip out the needles and start frogging and instead decided that I'd wait until my MIL came down to visit. She's a master knitter. She's custom knit for people for years. Surely she has encountered such a mess and has the ability to fix a master screw-up. If she can't fix it, it can't be fixed at all and then I can give up and start again.

She showed up around 6:15pm and I handed her my knitting with an explaination of what I'd tried to do. Without hesitation she started in to work and with an ease I don't even have when I'm knitting forward she unknit the whole row from where I'd left off. Still she wasn't able to find where I'd lost a stitch so she took up the needles again, hunted around and ended up unknitting back into the previous row in order to regain my lost stitch. I'd somethow knit together two stitches during my unknit-knit-unknit debacle - something I'd have never been able to fix on my own - and my MIL was able to fix it without a problem. All together my mess had been set right within fifteen minutes.

I have decided that should I get off pattern again I'm not going to subject myself and more importantly not subject my work to my half-assed attempts to fix it. I'm simply going to get up, go up to the eighth floor and hand it all to my MIL and know that she'll make it all better.

She's like a superhero in sensible shoes.