We take needles in hand, preparing for battle...

I hate UFOs. No, not the little green man-mobiles. In yarnspeak, a UFO is an UnFinished Object, which to some, presents a challenge, but to me, is aggravating as heck. I've got quite a few UFOs, and possibly some I've even forgotten about, and that drives me nuts.

Recently, I had the brilliant idea to knit a lovely ribbed scarf for my mom for Christmas (remind me not to tell said mother about this blog until *after* Christmas...). Now, I'm not very experienced with knitting, but the pattern said it was a good first project, so I figured I'd be just fine. After all, I'd taught myself to crochet with few major problems, and am now pretty darn good at it, if I do say so myself. Knitting, however, is another ball of yarn entirely. Heh. Anyway, I'd struggled through the first few rows, telling myself that it won't be spectacular right off the bat, and you need to get some length to really see the pattern. After a while, I'd gotten into a rather nice little groove with it, and got about 6 or 7 inches of scarf turned out before I looked at the pattern again. Crap. My scarf looks nothing like the one in the picture. It's interesting, sure, but not at all ribbed. After much frustration & swearing, I finally sought the advice of my deeply yarn addicted (but very knowledgable) friend Kathy, who incidentally was working on the very same pattern (though she pulled it out of the air, like magic, rather than from a teeny book like me. I'm convinced she's a Yarn Faerie, doomed to walk the earth in human form, due to some past transgression against the Yarn Gods of Olde.). It seems that all this time, and it was quite a long time to get that much length, I've been knitting wrong. Yup. Seriously wrong. Don't ask me how, I'm still not sure. At this juncture, I've got two options: 1. Finish scarf in bass-ackwards manner with incorrect stitches, potentially reinforcing the wrong stitch in my already addled little brain, and thus ruining any chance of further knitting success in the future. Or, 2. Tear out all previous stitches and start over from the beginning, thus working the proper stitches and getting used to doing them correctly, but also running the very real risk of not finishing it in time for Christmas (because, holy shit, knitting takes AGES!!). Also there's the added burn of having to basically negate all the work that I'd previously done, and that's just downright painful.

It's interesting to note that I made this awful discovery over a week ago, and have not touched the needles since. I've been too pissed & too frustrated to even look at it, which is rather stupid, but now I'm finally reaching the point of SomethingMustBeDone. I'm leaning towards option #2, though it does suck to contemplate, and I really don't think that I'll be any too likely to complete it in time. Even so, it's becoming a principle, I think. I HATE UFOs. I can't leave this half-knit (is that anything like half-wit? surely it must be...) ball of pretty green wool sitting there, mocking me forever. It MUST be conquered, one way or the other.

Test post

Here we go.