Woe, ’tis a dark day, here at the ‘Yarn. A heinous crime has been committed. I’ve been working on the crochet house-bag (doing the boring stuff; weaving in dozens of ends – an ideal job for when you’ve got a stinking head-cold.) I have to say, it’s going extremely well and I’m rather excited about the finished product. It’s gone from this:-
…to a proper 3-d house-bag with shoulder strap, but I’m hanging back from showing you until I can ta-da it properly. Thank you to commenters who endorsed my idea of working up a knitted version too. Patterns to follow.
Anyways, back to the crime scene.
Having sewn/crocheted the bag components, I decided to add a couple of extra rows of tiles to the roof before attaching it. But look!
Somebody, somebody, has been a-meddling in my project bag and has cut my yarn. Horrors! But who could it be?
The suspect list is short. I know I’m not guilty. And the Stoic Spouse is a careful sort, not given to random acts of fibrous sabotage. So that leaves the Toddler Twinnage. They’ve been paying an unhealthy degree of attention to my yarn snippers lately, and I bet it was them. But how on earth to determine which one? Interrogation has failed. And there’s no point in taking DNA samples from the crime scene. That’s the problem with identical twins.
True story: many moons ago, there was a heist at a jewellery shop. Detectives managed to get a decent sample of DNA from the crime scene which you might quite reasonably assume would lead to an arrest. But the problem was that the DNA linked back to a pair of identical twins… and nobody could establish which one of them had committed the crime. Being not stupid (the blighters), neither of the twins held up a hand to say, ‘Yeah it was me. How could you possibly accuse such a decent and law-abiding citizen as my brother of such a crime?’ And so nobody was ever convicted.
Do you see what I’m up against?
So I have no idea who cut my yarn. I effected a messy Russian join, thus ending up with a thick and lumpy patch of yarn with which to add more roof tiles to the house-bag. But I have a strong suspicion that the culprit is blonde, less than three feet tall, and obsessively pre-occupied with dinosaurs. Any ideas?
One of our cats chewed through my yarn this week, and I didn’t even realise till it nearly disappeared through my hands mid stitch. I’m thinking it was a cat anyway … the husband did a good job of looking innocently surprised at my exclamation. Still leaves 4 furry suspects though …
Disaster! 🙁 those pesky kids, mine’s the same. Obsessed with my projects and my stash. Jeeeeeez. Don’t know where he gets it from…
Can’t wait to see the finished project. Good luck with the investigation, too 🙂
This was perhaps the saddest and most hilarious thing I’ve read in a long time. “Interrogation has failed.” lol I love it. I can’t wait to see it all finished! So adorable!
I think you’ll just have to give up the idea of finding the culprit. And put your projects on a VERY high shelf where no ladder, stool or chair can access them. Ha. Now you can be scared they’ll fall off a ladder ……
This may be one of those mysteries where the real criminal gets away. Or toddles off to the playroom.
Working on my fair isle vest, I managed to cut the wrong yarn at a color change – welcome to the world of spit-spicing. Luckily this is a two-ply yarn, so I trimmed one ply out, and managed to splice the yarn back together with no lumps. But I do take responsibility for the cut – no toddler granddaughters to blame!
Ha! And this is only the beginning of twinnage troubles…..what might teenager twinnage get up to. 😉 Of course you could always threaten them with micro-chipping!
😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 LOL
Yes, the allure of snipping the yarn just like mommy. Time to get a project vault that is twinnage proof. I would also lay out some yarn for each, with tiny children’s scissors and let them snip away under your watchful eye so they can get it out of their system. They are looking to experience the “feel” of snipping yarn.
That would be the least of your worries if you let Earl loose in your stash ;). I am making my sister a 50th birthday shawl. I am delving into the unknown and terrifying world of “crochet charts”, horizontal stitches and all kinds of terrifying things. I had a practice go yesterday and got SO hooked I didn’t go to bed till 10pm which is unheard of on a regular day but I helped Stevie-boy load, haul and unload 4 trailer loads of logs yesterday so I think I must be either seriously addicted to this pattern or rapidly developing the qualities of a yarn zealot. I actually coerced him into heading into town to buy wool for the project on a day when the whole city was FULL of Easter egg hunters maniacally scrabbling through supermarkets to fill their baskets…madness! I can’t wait to get to see the TA-DA! of the house bag. It is gorgeous and remember, you catch more bees with honey than you do with a stick (unless the honey is on the end of the stick when you have just reached no-man’s land…) Try this. “Whoever cut my yarn can have some extra Easter chocolate”. I am guessing that the toddler twinage, who have obviously mastered junior deceit, may not yet have “master of reverse psychology” tucked into their belts. Make sure you have both of them there at the same time as they will both own up to doing it but the one that REALLY did it won’t be able to stop themselves from saying “oy, you KNOW it was me!” or at least shoving their twin over in a toddlery tantrummy kind of way. You will then have outsmarted todlers, AND know who did it. You can then move on to the next stage of surviving your children, although you might not want to do that…it only gets worse! 😉 Have a lovely Easter Ms Twisted and whoever dun it, those scissors are gorgeous. I can’t honestly say that I wouldn’t want to cut yarn with them. The problem might just be as simple to solve as getting yourself some pug ugly scissors for cutting yarn 😉
Where there’s a pair of yarn snippers, there is bound to be a snip sooner or later… Lock them up well! (I mean the snippers…) : )
Did you know however that twins do not have the same fingerprints?! Though chances of getting fingerprints of wool are probably non-existent. I’m not seriously suggesting this – just making using of my long ago PhD!!
Ah. If it is the twins, now they know how scissors work… Maybe better your yarn than their hair..? (Although I do suggest full video surveillance. You say Stoic Spouse is stoic – are you sure he’s not secretly working on a rival crochet project and planning a big reveal seconds before yours?)
Thank you for the laughs! I had some yarn sabotage in my bag once (through a hole bundle of yarn) and I was ranting about someone not opening a box carefully with a blade. Unfortunately it turned out my craft scissors had fallen out of their little pouch into the bottom of my bag and had done the mischief… so sadly I was probably my own culprit for not putting them away carefully!
Can’t wait to see the bag!
My husband just told me his mother had an ingenious way of finding culprits by asking questions in a wondering proud mother voice like:
“Oh wow who did this amazing bit of art on the wall?!? Look at those beautiful colors! How artful!”
When the boy (it was always one of the boys) stood up to say he was the wonder child who had produced such amazing work, sweet mother transformed into Mommie Dearest!
Your blog posts are so engaging! Can you dust for fingerprints? LOL.