yarnporn.com

When I woke up this morning to find my 3 year old daughter with my basket of sock yarn, snippers, and a ball winder. 13 small neat balls of yarn sat on one side of her, and a pile of tangled (and snipped) skeins on the other. “Hi Mommy. Good morning!” Lexi chirped, very proud of her work.

(You know when you’re being a punk teenager and giving your parents grief, and they say “I hope you have children just like you someday!” That’s actually kind of what was running through my head.)

“I’m good, how are you?” (My head is going to explode, I’m going to kill my husband for letting her go to bed early, I’m going to build a yarn vault with a combination lock.)

“Not knitting, just this.” She smiles, sets down the winder and comes back with knitting needles. One (a size 7 us aluminum) is bent right in the middle at a 45 degree angle and somehow secured through a series a knots and loops to a My Little Pony and another knitting needle. “I knit!”

She knits! Okay more like free form knotting but who’s going to be picky at a moment like this? My daughter knits!

She leaves me with the pony, yarn and needle affair. She scoops up the tidy balls of yarn and puts them into her shopping basket (it’s a little wire affair that came with some plastic fruit and grocery items) Then she very carefully returns the tangled pile of yarn into my sock yarn basket.

I watch, stunned, slowly it dawns on me what she means to do.

“I take these okay.” She holds up the little wire basket.
She is a knitter, and my stash is her yarn store. I’m frozen in place, she takes the pony affair from me and plops it into her basket.

As she toddled off, I was jolted out of my shock by my son yelling “Noooooo!” I ran in (it was one of those kinds of yells that puts hustle into a mom’s step and fear in her heart) to check on him. “Lexi took my ne-e-edle!” He held up the scarf he’s been working forever and waved it at me, “Why did she wake up so early?” He demanded, he was glowering, steaming.

It occurs to me that the pony affair has a bent #7 needle and is in the exact same yarn used in Josey’s scarf, I decide to keep my mouth shut.
“Breakfast first then we’ll sort this out.” I hug him and quickly take the scarf, “I’ll put one of my needles through the loops, okay?”

He nods, I leave him to go make breakfast. Walking past the homeschooling area I see that Lexi has settled down in the rocking chair and appears to be knotting and looping English style (which involves throwing the yarn over the pony with her right hand, then sticking her whole hand through the loop, catching it around the needle, and then twisting the pony around, I think perhaps I could convince her to try Continental (where the pony is tensioned with the left hand and the right hand needle controls the looping.)

Breakfast was uneventful, oatmeal and toast, Josey is unusually silent. I volunteer (and entrust with some ceremony) my size 7 Brittanys to replace Josey’s needles. Like the true knitter he is, he accepts my offer enthusiastically. “I was hoping for those because the wood is better anyway.”

Nearly five hours later and I’m blogging about it, I have yet to check the carnage of what’s left of my sock yarn. Josey looked at the yarn for me. He came back with “We should save the cut up stuff for color knitting, or maybe we could graft it.” So I’m thinking the status is somewhere between “not so good” and “have you ever considered taking up cross stitch?”

…sigh…

It’s hard to spin in the fetal position.