When writing Ravelry project posts, one has the option to place an emoticon beside the project, to describe or show one’s emotional relationship with the item detailed in the project notes.

For many weeks now, the Tatami project I began ages ago, has had a grimace beside it, denoting my extreme lack of satisfaction at the painful and boring experience that knitting the garment had thus far inspired in me.

Hoping to refresh my relationship with this doomed garment, people, I bought it with me to Ireland. Some time away together, I thought, to solve our issues. After three nights of giving the project enormous amounts of special attention (coffee, wine, chocolates, etc.) I finally came to the end of the sleeves, and I felt we had a breakthrough.

It appears however that my lack of fully functioning brain cells (0.0003% knitting cells activated at last check) led me to Bind Off from the centre of the garment, so that instead of BO the sleeve portion of my knitting on one side, people, I bound off the main portion of the cardigan body. For those uninitiated into the way of the Tatami, this spells unmitigated disaster. Because Tatami is a drop-stitch pattern, I have now effectively dropped an entire section of stitches that I really, really, really did not want to be dropping. Meanwhile, the portion of the garment that was supposed to be BO, (i.e. the sleeve section on one side) remains intact, poised on the needles, ready to be knit onwards.

What is WRONG with me?

Why Oh Why is there no Ravelry emoticon that can truly express, beyond the grimace, the true abyss of knitting despair into which I find myself currently to be flung? I hate the Tatami with undisguised hatred. But more than this, I hate myself. For being so stupid, for making such a pedestrian error. For essentially proving my unworthiness as a knitter. I do not deserve to be counted amongst the knitters of this world. Those who have knit Tatami, or who are familiar with the pattern will be able to identify the glaring mistake in this photo:

*bangs head on keyboard*

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As I prepare myself for the joys of now collecting my dropped stitches, stitch by stitch, using a crochet hook, I find that I am saved by a glimmer of a positive insight:

Just maybe the combination of the scratchy, tangly, thrifted yarn that Tatami is being knit with,* and my erroneously twisted stitches, means that the dropped stitches will be reluctant to drop, and therefore easily retrievable?

I think, people, this could be the making of us.

Project Update: the Tatami has been saved. Since the stitches have to be dropped anyway, it actually wasn’t necessary to pick up all the stitches I had dropped. Instead I simply picked up the top two stitches, so I could continue to knit as before. I then Bound Off the correct portion of Tatami and have been continuing it grimly ever since writing this post. I can’t finish it soon enough!