I thought a scary knitting story would be just the thing!
So, I present:
A Yarn of Terror
It was a dark and stormy night. The knitter was settled in her favorite chair finishing the most exquisite cabled sweater. She had been laboring on this sweater (a labor of love) for months, but this particular project had been several years in the making. It began with a glimpse of a blue cabled sweater on a crowded street – a sweater of such arresting beauty that it lived in her memory in excruciating detail. The color, the shape, the cables (oh, the cables!).
Thus the pattern search began. Every sweater leaflet in every yarn shop, every issue of every knitting magazine, every project book in every bookstore ….until one day, she found it! There in a quiet corner of a quiet shop: the directions for the most exquisite cabled sweater itself.
Thus the yarn hunt began. And it had been surprisingly brief. After only a few forays into knitting shops, she had found the perfect yarn: a blue worsted weight merino with body enough to bear cables proudly and which felt like a warm caress on the skin. The color (oh, the color!) as deep as the sea and as wide as the sky, a blue that celebrated winter’s majesty but would laugh in the face of the bleakest, coldest, grayest winter day. Azure. That was it. A bold and brazen yarn – with a bold and brazen price. And she needed 14 balls. Too much, too much.
She walked away from that yarn, but it stayed with her. In her thoughts. And in yarn catalogs. And in magazine advertisements. And in online yarn retail shops. And always for that same bold and brazen price. How could she justify it?
But how do you justify a dream? One day, she walked back into the shop, somberly pulled 14 balls of the most exquisite Azure merino on the face of the earth from the shelf, carefully checked each dyelot number, and placed them in her basket. She marched to the counter smiled bravely and pulled out her credit card. The yarn was hers.
Knitting the sweater had progressed as these things often do. She had swatched, measured, calculated, re-swatched, re-measured, re-calculated. There had been a certain amount of ripping back, a cable or two gone awry that had to be re-wrought (and that genuine erratum in the directions, but one need not go into that). She had wisely knit the sleeves first – in order to master the complex cabling -- and the front had gone more smoothly (although not flawlessly) because of that, she was sure. And certainly all the little re-workings needed to correct any little mistakes (including the one that was not her fault – but errata happens…) were worth the effort. The front of the sweater was gorgeous.
She had knit the back with fewer errors, but with a bit less enthusiasm as well. She had measured frequently, knitting almost blindly (so completely were the cable patterns seared into her brain now), counting down cable twists, counting down balls. The day she broke the band on the final ball, she nearly wept with joy. She had a ways to go before the neck and then the shoulder shaping, but the end was clearly in sight.
And so, there she was on this dark and stormy night, knitting diligently row after row, eagerly anticipating the neck shaping, the shoulder shaping, the blessed binding off. It was not surprising, one supposes, that she did not notice the subtle lightening of the final yarn ball – the lightening in weight as the yarn ball ceases to be a ball and, in the darkness of a knitting bag, becomes merely a straggly strand of yarn. She did not notice the end of that strand of yarn snaking up beside her leg, not until it hung from her knitting needle like an ill-fated worm on the hook of a fishing pole. The last of the yarn.
Her fingers kept knitting – like the digits of an automaton – as she stared in fascinated horror at the yarn’s end: 6 inches, 5 inches, 4 inches. She stopped knitting. The sweater back – not quite to the neck shaping, much less the shoulder shaping (and there was still the wretched neckline ribbing to go…) – hung from her still and silent needles.
She sprang into action, digging into her oh-so-empty knitting bag for the yarn receipt – the shop’s website was printed there! She raced to her computer as the rain rattled the windows and the wind tore through the trees overhead. She brought up the website – and the sad little notice announcing the yarn shop’s demise. Gone out of business.
So, undaunted, she started with the first online retailer in her bookmarks and worked her way down, searching each one for her yarn, her ideal Azure merino – so popular, so expensive. Out of Stock. Out of Stock. Discontinued. Out of Stock. Discontinued. Discontinued….
Nowhere. Nowhere.
Her fingers flew as she typed in her Ravely password. She would search the stashes of knitters around the country, around the world -- and dyelots be d—d! She yelped in triumph when the results came up: 173 knitters had stashed her yarn! In Magenta, in Forest, in Ebony, in Satsuma, Oyster, Raisin, Buttercup, Buttercup, Buttercup, Peacock, Alabaster, Alabaster, Ebony, Forest, Earthworm, Magenta, Grizzly Bear, Belladonna, Oyster, Forest, Raisin, Raisin, Hoot Owl, Pistachio-Mint, and on and on…but no Azure. Not a single ball of Azure.
And as the knitter -- thrusting the not-quite-finished back of the never-to-be-finished exquisite cabled sweater into the air, the ragged banner of a doomed campaign -- howled into the night like a Magenta Grizzly Bear herself, the internet crashed and the lights went out.
The End
Happy Halloween!
