The Case of the Misplaced Purls

It was a dark night in the knitting bag.

Suddenly a scream rang out. Actually, it was more like a, "Gaaaah! $@# of a &!%*^ argh argh!" but it got the point across.

Only one thing could make a mild-mannered knitter sound like a salty old sailor in a freestyle cussing contest. One glance down a long winding cable told it all: two misplaced purls, standing out as plain as a rusty pickup in the yacht club parking lot.

It was going to take some work to get that case straightened out. At first I thought I'd have to do the ol' rip 'n tear, a visit to the frog pond if you know what I mean. But that seemed pretty ham-handed, and I'd lose a lot of ground just to gain those two purls. There had to be a better way.

I put the ol' noggin to the problem and before long, the light went on upstairs. Of course! Visions of ladders danced through my skull, or rather, one twisty ladder leading straight to those misplaced purls. If I were careful, I might just make it without losing any more time. Quietly I worked my way across until I was right over the purls... then dropped... and dropped... and dropped. Bam! I hit 'em hard and rubbed 'em out.

But that left a laddery mess to deal with. I called on Red to help me out, to lift some of my old work out of the mess.

Red's partner was a bit of, well, a hooker you might say, but the two of them went straight to work, knitting up the ravl'd sleeve of care as the ol' bard said:


Halfway through the job, Red proved a pretty slippery character. But Clover came along, and with a nothing but a wooden look, took over the job.

Under, over, around, and up the ladder Clover and the hooker went until they'd reached the top.

That finished it, leaving me happy as a cat in a catnip factory. Case solved.