first blood

Some of you may remember it. A demonic little piece of terrorist weaponry, a strange cross between House of Flying Daggers and Arsenic and Old Lace. The Project from Heck. Which, admittedly, has a nice ring to it.

Some of you may call it knitting a traditional Icelandic hat. Those who saw it called it the Knitting Project I would Never Do. All of them. And I quote. Little Blue Duck calls it the Swift Road to Insanity.

It was doomed from the start. I really don't know how the Duck missed the signs. Sign #1 was that the materials had to be purchased from a secretive location somewhere in downtown Reykjavík, open only for several hours on Mondays and Thursdays, deserted but for the occasional crafty-looking woman, usually smiling helpfully. Yes, doomed from the start. For the mere price of a kidney, one can purchase a ready-made knitted hat piece, but Blue Duck was saving them for her M.A. and decided it couldn't be THAT hard to do the knitting (even if the instructions did call for size 1.5 needles). So she bought her pattern and her yarn and exited the shop. The bells on the door jingled ominously as she went out. She thought that the yarn looked suspiciously like black thread. Doomed from the start.

The next step was to buy the needles. But since the needles required were not, in fact, needles but rather some highly dangerous razor-thin plastic blades issued by the CIA from 1971-72, they were not to be had in just your average knitting store. The Duck traversed the city in search of them. Fruitlessly. At last, one persistantly nice store owner cracked open a copy of the Reykjavík phone book, and, after several tries, found a dark basement on the other side of downtown whose occupants admitted to owning a 1.25 and a 1.75. The Duck went the size down. No doubt about it, doomed from the start.

Now, when one is knitting using thread-sized yarn not yet rolled into a ball rather still twisted in a skein, as the Duck was, it is common procedure to roll it into that ball before beginning to knit, to prevent it from tangling into a labyrinthine mass that closely resembles Medusa's snaky hairdo. The Duck was sadly unaware of this common procedure. Doom inched a little closer. Ironically, as the knitting certainly didn't.

The instructions say the entire hat will take an evening's knit, if you have good eyesight. Three months later, she had completed approximately a centimetre. Doomed, doomed, doomed.

Things seemed to be looking up when she decided to go home for the summer. She remembered not to put it in her hand-luggage when she packed it up, was not convicted for attempted plane-hijacking, and when she got safely to the other end even found an innocent victim to help her unravel the horrifying web. A record-smashing 3 centimetres were knitted. That was before she realized she couldn't find the pattern. It seems, of all things, she has left it in Iceland.

Yesterday she drew first blood. She was putting the knitting down on a chair when it caught on an invisible plastic bag. The impact drove the blade into her hand. A single tear of blood rolled out. It mourned the madness that drove Blue Duck to begin a skothúfa in the first place.

Once she has finished the knitting, she will have to buy herself the tassle (she seems to remember it being 3000 ISK/$60 CAN) and the silver tube to go with it (this is REAL silver, folks, and custom-made at that). Maybe she should take her time. Yes, this project is doom personified.