Pain and Pleasure

When my knitting is going well, when the stitches are flowing nicely and lovely fabric is emerging from my needles, it is so pleasant. The feeling of contentment and accomplishment are very fulfilling.

And then I look down and find a hole! A big honking pea sized hole! 4 rows down! How the hell did that get in there? What is going on? It seems like black magic! Suddenly instead of being a source of pleasure, the knitting needles seem like cruel instruments of torture!

Last night I had the hat to the length (7") needed to begin decreasing. I tried it on and looked in the mirror and it seemed like it might actually be a cute and useful hat (though it is kind of thin. I still don't like the texture of this yarn. But it looked ok.) I sat back down ready for the challenge of decreases while watching Ugly Betty and discovered Ugly Hat in my lap! For a moment I thought there was more than one hole, but no, it was just one, but it looked huge. As if a hungry moth took a chunk out of my hat while my back was turned. I tried picking up stitches, thinking maybe I had just dropped a stitch, but that wasn't working. So I bit the bullet and started ripping.

Luckily the stitches were fairly loose, so I had a chance of getting them back on the needles. And I had the bright (I think) idea of going ahead and putting the stitches onto dpns at this point rather than getting them back on the circular needle, re-knitting 4 rows, and then switching to dpns in a few more rows. But will the dpns leave gaps (ladders?) Sigh. I don't know, I'll just have to press on. With a little persistence, I should be able to finish the hat today. Provided I don't do anything else stupid (I must have made a yarn over, creating a damn *buttonhole* in the middle of the hat!) And I think I can knit cables next? Am I delirious?

On the bright side, I created the entire Powerpoint presentation for the Korean Medical Association yesterday, after roughing the ideas out in Word. I thought I would have to get technical assistance from Kristen, but I managed to get the points to fade in smoothly all on my own! Sam looked at it and was very impressed both by the content and the technology (of course, he's probably never seen a Powerpoint presentation before, so it's not hard to impress him.) He's going to attend the presentation with me. I am feeling so relieved now that this is written and ready to go. I know I can easily talk for an hour, and I hope there's something of use to anyone who might be in the audience.