Knotted, er, I mean, knitted

It's 11:47 p.m. and I should be in bed. It's officially past my bedtime, but I am committed to a project that I started almost 3 hours ago. To turn this mess into...

This.

How did I get here, you may ask? Well, it all started much earlier today. We'd just had coffee and I was sitting in our office (my new favorite place to sit) looking at our newly installed bookshelves that were just waiting to be filled with all of our music books and flute and saxophone CDs. A long project, but with a very satisfying result.


Then I turned my attention to the closet in one of the guest rooms that was one of the last refuges of boxes from our move last year. The boxes contained mostly old quilts and blankets from our childhoods. They were nice boxes to open.



At the bottom of one box, I found my knitting bag, which I hadn't thought about in about 3 years and before that, 12 years. Jeff had joined me in the sorting process by then and found this little test piece I had made.

He was so impressed -- seriously! And I was like, this is nothing! Back in my youth, I actually knew how to knit and made my very own sweater and everything, which got a blue ribbon at the 4-H fair, thank you very much. (There's no way I could do that now, by the way...) Anyway, there he was, standing there all impressed and the topic of scarves came up. So I asked him if he would actually wear a scarf if I made it and he said definitely yes. And he would tell everyone that I made it for him, too.

So this evening I sat down with my mother's trusty "Learn How to Knit" book that has both left- and right-handed instructions (lefty here) that has all the patterns I recognize. It came back pretty quickly, so I was inspired to get to work on the scarf this very night. (I must admit that I was perhaps influenced by my recent completion of The Friday Night Knitting Club, a book I enjoyed very much.)

I pulled out the lovely green wool yarn that I bought 3 years when I last thought I might knit something nice for Jeff. It was wrapped in this beautiful figure-8 twist. I found the end, but then something terrible happened and I ended up with the mess you saw at the top. So here I sit. Pile of knotted wool yarn in front of me, wishing I could go back in time and be much more careful as I pulled on the loose end. *sigh*

It is nice to have a project.