Not being a particularly NEWSY day at the shop, I've decided to share a personal story. Recently, I had the wonderfully spiritually cleansing experience of throwing out (into the trash can) a partially completed project that I WAS NEVER EVER GOING TO FINISH. It had haunted me for years: the Orange Dress.
Awhile back, something like 6 years ago, my husband (not a knitter OR a sweater-wearer) accompanied me into a yarn shop during a vacation to Maine. Needless to say, it was an unusual experience and as thrilled as I was, I had a certain nervousness about the whole thing, so I hurried about trying to take it all in while my husband browsed through the knitting magazines. Specifically, it was Rebecca that caught his eye: the European Rebecca, featuring incredibly hip patterns modeled by impossibly tall, lanky, Scandinavian BABES with 8 foot long legs, usually strolling barefoot along a beautiful beach… I should have known I was in trouble when he said, “Why don’t you make this?” pointing to an orange ribbed minidress barely covering one of the BABES.
Unfortunately, the shop had the yarn, just a bag of it, in the exact color orange. (Understand by orange, I don’t mean the charmingly muted tone of a faded summer daylily, but rather something more akin to a Penn Dot rubber road cone.) Despite my concerns that the color wasn’t my best, my husband enthusiastically purchased the bag of yarn, just enough and all they had, along with the pattern and the picture of the BABE, and off we went.
Well, as you might imagine, I very quickly determined that the pattern, although pleasant enough to work on, was never going to turn me into the BABE. In fact, although I am decently thin and petite, I could tell as I was going along with it that I would more closely resemble, at best, a great big curvy carrot. A carrot with very short legs…
So I did what any of us would do, I stuffed it into the back of the closet, where it lived for about 2 years. Eventually my husband insisted that I couldn’t add to my stash, growing at what he considered to be an alarming rate, until I finished the ORANGE DRESS. So, out it came. Now here’s the part that I feel really bad about: …somehow our very exuberant, oral, flat-coated retriever, Bailey, well, somehow, she got hold of 3 balls of the yarn and shredded them…
My husband discovered the disaster and was horrified. The shop in Maine, not being computerized like Cultured Purl, had NO record of the yarn. I, being me, had long ago lost the die lot information. But we searched. And searched. And, well, there just wasn’t any more of that yarn (right dye lot or not) to be had… With not anywhere near the amount of yarn required, the project went back into the closet where it stayed for a couple more years. I couldn’t believe it, but my husband STILL talked about the freaking ORANGE DRESS that I never finished EVERY TIME I bought yarn for a new project. He also couldn’t understand why I couldn’t somehow make it work with what I had left. The guilt of the whole thing was just really really getting to me. So…the other day I threw it all out. Trash day. Gone. Gone for good. I have chalked it up to the learning of a valuable lesson: never buy a shop’s entire inventory of a yarn for your project, even if it seems like enough for the project. And never let your husband browse Rebecca while you shop; better yet, have him wait in the car…
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