Knitting While Drunk

Or crocheting while tired, or any variety of the form [craft] + [mental impairment].

I often think of crafting as having certain milestones, immutable laws that every crafter is going to slam into at some point regardless of whether or not they've been warned the wall -- I mean law -- is there.  (Case in point:  I taught a friend to knit and she recently messaged me to ask, rhetorically and with much frustration, why everyone seems to think she's crocheting.)  So it stands to reason that even though I know that crocheting late at night is always agreed to be a bad idea, and definitely because I assured myself that being a Night Owl excused me from the inevitable... I slammed into a wall.

As far as I can tell, this is what happened last night.

Well okay, I have to back up and explain what's going on so that you'll understand the utter hilarity and nonsense that occurred last night.

I'm working on this, which I will probably explain some other time.  It's constructed with my own two-color squares, which I should make a second post about because I've learned some tricks.  One of those tricks is that when you make squares like this and join them as you go the way that I am, you have to be very careful which color is Color A and which is Color B.

They can't join along the first side since by the fourth round it's starting in the middle of a side, so I have to make sure that the first side is along an open edge.  (As you can see, the open edges are always the right and bottom sides of the square.)  Take a look at those red-and-purple squares.  On the top one, I started with Color A = Red, and when I got to the joining round I worked along what is now the bottom edge in red, then the right edge still in red, switched to purple and joined along the top and left sides, and then switched back to red for the remainder of the bottom edge.  If I had started with purple I would have had to join half the top edge, work all the way around, and somehow join the remainder of the top edge.  It's like a badly-constructed zipper and doesn't really work at all.

On the two red-and-purple squares not present in the picture, Color A = Purple.  This is because those two squares are essentially identical to their opposite counterparts, but with the colors switched.  (In other words, the bottom square has the colors slanting the same direction as the top square, but the top and left edges are red while the bottom and right edges are purple.)

So -- now that you understand where I'm coming from -- as near as I can figure, this is what happened last night:

At about 1:00 -- in the morning -- I was working on the square to go to the right of the silver one, when a friend messaged me that she was having nightmares and would I stay up with her a while.  I agreed, and decided that I'd do the next square as well to finish off that star shape before I went to bed.

If I had to guess I would say it was about 1:20 when I finished the square I was working on, smoothed it in place, and picked up the yarn for the next one.  With Color A = Purple, I started crocheting around while alternately watching parts of TED Talks and typing out messages to my friend  (the TED Talks were to occupy the time she was typing on her phone, which is much slower than typing on a computer keyboard).

Now it's 1:45.  I got to the joining round, and decided that I must have made the square wrong because it didn't look like it matched up properly.  Since it wasn't the first time I'd started with the wrong color, I realized I must have started with the wrong color, and proceeded to rip the whole thing out with much cursing.  With Color A = Red, I started again.  (You see where my problem is.)

Hazarding another guess, it's 2:20-ish by the time I reached the joining round again (usually these squares don't take me as long, but usually I'm not setting them down every few minutes to type).  I put the square into its place, joined the whole thing, cut the yarn, wove in the ends, and spread the whole thing out so I could see my first completed star.

It was now 2:38 in the morning.  This is what I should have been looking at:

And then slowly this realization crept into my brain that something just wasn't right here.  I should have been looking at the above, but what I was actually looking at was this:

The diagonal lines along the edge of the red triangles were matching up and I was pretty sure that was incorrect.  I should have taken a picture but when I figured out what had happened I was so aghast I didn't think about it.  I had woven in the ends and everything. I stared at it a few minutes more trying to figure out what I had done wrong.  Had I just started joining on the wrong edge?  If I pulled out the last round and restarted it would that fix the problem?  At first I thought the answer was yes, so I picked out the ends and unraveled the join and tilted the square to its proper orientation.

Wait, my brain said, but this means joining in the first side.  I can't do that.  I simply could not comprehend how this was possible.  And then it hit me.  I had started with the wrong color.  And then the next realization hit me.  I had done it right the first time.

It was now 2:43 in the morning.  As the reality of this situation sank in, all I could do was start laughing.  I had made it correctly, decided it was wrong, ripped it all out, made it incorrectly, attached it incorrectly, finished it off, woven in all the ends... and only then had I noticed.  It had taken me about an hour and a half.  Normally I can do one of those squares in twenty minutes.

I explained all of this to my friend, and added, "I think maybe I should frog it, wind the yarn into butterflies, stop thinking about yarn in terms of animals, and go to bed."  She agreed.  So that's what I did.

I'm still laughing, but I haven't re-reworked the square yet.  I'm afraid it'll find yet another way to screw me over.