Knitting under the influence

Last week I came down with a nasty bug that City Boy kindly passed on to me. After telling him for a week that he was just suffering man flu I was forced to admit that there was possibly some truth in his complaints. So after dosing myself with cold and flu medicine I struggled into work, managed to achieve the bare minimum required of me for the day and left around lunchtime.


When feeling a bit grotty, what could be nicer than snuggling under a quilt on the sofa with a film and some knitting for the afternoon? So I made a detour to the yarn shop and selected some sock yarn to turn into something nice for a well deserving friend. (Full and frank disclosure: this is actually for a Christmas present. Christmas 2010 that is, not 2011. I knew that I wouldn’t be seeing said friend over the Christmas period and thought I had plenty of time to get knitting. I’m now up against a deadline).


So, equipped with new yarn, I prepped the sofa with the necessary tea, lemsip, pillows, quilts and kittens, and spent a lazy afternoon knitting away in front of the TV. A couple of days later, fully recovered, I picked the sock back up and had a realisation.


I should never again go yarn shopping under the influence of flu drugs.

And further, neither should I try to knit cables off the top of my head.

I don’t know what I was thinking. We can blame the cables wandering off in the wrong direction on me being easily distracted at the best of times, but the yarn? Those colours? Together?


It may be just your thing, in which case, great. I have 60 grams left of the stuff – drop me a line. But it’s not me, and it’s definitely not the well deserving friend. It resembles no yarn that I have either bought or desired to buy, and so I can only conclude that it found its way into my bag due to me being drugged.


So I went back to the yarn shop and tried again.

 This turquoise is very me. I love the pattern (A variation on Pomatomus by Cookie A. – available on knitty.com) and I adore the colour. And I want to keep them.

Perhaps I had it wrong and my friend will in fact love brown, purple and fluorescent yellow stripes with wonky cables?