Darn it! Darn It! Darn It!


In honor of The Big M getting sprung and the whims of the fashion fascists that preclude gloves from being sold in March - I darned my gloves.

Dogger has put holes in the fingers of every pair of gloves I own, one year for Christmas I got six pairs of dark blue knit gloves and five of those are still living, you name the occasion, I have the glove for it - at least I did until Dogger decided that the yarn from those gloves would be an excellent before dinner snack and took to nipping little bits of them on our walks. The first time, this was more or less fine, I have all those gloves on stand by and I wasn’t dumb enough to wear my really nice gloves anyway. So. Dogger put little holes in four pairs of gloves. I went to the flea market and bought another pair of blue knit gloves - she put a hole in those too.

This pissed me off. I was driving to work every morning with a bit of a finger turning blue. If I scrunched the gloves up and tried to stretch the un torn bits over the torn bits it just got worse so now the gloves were stretched out and had a hole in the finger. I looked like the Little Match File Manager.

I started to think “What Would Martha Do?”. Martha would kill the dog who put holes in her dog walking gloves for one then she would grind the dog into fertilizer, take its blood for use as a natural dye, use its tail to keep drafts out from under the doors, transform its legs into pencil boxes, use its ears for kicky change purses and finally, use its pelt to make a charming teddy bear for the neighbor children, so The Martha Way was not an option. What else would Martha do to fix her gloves?

Martha would terrorize the help who would raise the sheep, micro manage the shearing the sheep, bully the people who would spin the wool into yarn, drive insane the horticulturist as they cultivated, raised and harvested the imported antique wild flowers used to dye the yarn and finally, frighten the plants into dropping the thorns that she would demand the seamstress to use as needles to repair the damage. And it would be a Good Thing. I don’t have any help to terrorize and I don’t think the wetlands are good for flower raising and I doubt my yard is zoned for sheep farming. I had to do the Next Best Thing.

I went to Wal-Mart and bought the cheapest blue yarn I could find. Yarn, oddly, is not just like thread. It does not go merrily into the eye of the needle. If you have lived a good life and have managed to resist temptation in the form of free chocolate sundaes and saved many toddlers from peril and countless kittens from meat grinders, then and only then, will you finally be able to get the whole piece of yarn through the eye of the needle - it will not end up making neat, even little stitches... It makes lumps. Untidy, un attractive, lumpy lumps of yarn.

I did the first glove. I was so excited to be starting I forgot to turn the glove inside out to do the stitching. This was dumb, on that pair of gloves, one finger is, um, misshapen. My fingers may be um, misshapen, but they are warm. It was a Good Thing.