He Gasped

When I was dating my husband, I brought him to my parents' house for a family dinner. As we were sitting at the table, someone said something so amusing that he laughed. With industriousness. My brother commented afterward that he had never seen anyone laugh so hard that the dishes shook in the china cabinet.

So making my husband laugh became an important goal in our relationship. Occasionally I pull it off, and, of course, I am very, very proud.

It was not until 20 or so years into our marriage (yes, it is true, I have no idea how long we've been married... the calculator is too far away for me to reach it easily), that I first heard my husband gasp.

It was Christmas-time last year, and my Mom was in the hospital. When my parents were in the hospital, I generally collected up my computer and whatever project I was working on with fiber and slept, awkwardly poised in a chair with a blanket around me. So Christmas day came, and my husband and son came to see us at the hospital, and I was very excited, because I had finished making a hat. Hat #2, we'll call it.

There were some issues.

Hat #1 was my first attempt to use circular needles and double-pointy needles. I got through the hat quite nicely. At the end, my mother said I needed to use double-pointed needles, or whatever you call them, so I worked my way as far as I could before the needles started falling all over the place. I didn't want to bother my Mom with pesky details, so I took a darning needle and darned the top of the hat. I think my friend Channyn would be appalled. It looked ok to me, though. I figured I'd learn the fine art of finishing on the next hat. Here's Hat #1:

If everyone would agree not to look too closely at the top, we'll be just fine, thank you very much

But back to Hat #2. My friend Edie had taken some yarn that I made by plying homespun orange and pink wool with some fancy brown commercial yarn and made a sample so I could see how it would look knitted up. It looked good to me, so I thought I would make it into a hat. If you look closely, you can see her sample has a strand of hot pink, a strand of orange, and then this brown commercial fancy yarn that I suppose you might call eyelash yarn:

So my husband and son showed up at the hospital on Christmas morning, and I was a bit bleary eyed from a night sleeping upright in a chair. I got all excited and said, "Oh HONEY, you have to see the hat I've just finished. So I ran into the bathroom, plopped it on my head and whirled around.

And that's when he gasped.

Something I've never heard him do before.

In something like 20 years. Maybe 25, if you count the 5 in which he claims he was dating me.

OK, so, admittedly, the hat was too big for my head, had four double pointy needles hanging off the top, and strands of orange and brown flopping out from various parts of it, because I didn't have scissors or a darning needle....

So for his punishment, here is my Sweet Sweet Patookie, wearing Hat #2, which fits him quite nicely, if you ask me. My friend Channyn picked up all the dropped stitches and finished it off, presumably to keep me from getting out the staple gun to make the top all tie together:

For what it's worth, yes, I do know it looks awful.