Confession: A pause in the proceedings

I believe that I have already admitted that this is not a blog in real time at the moment. In real time, I am at (hopefully) the end of rather a long pause in knitting. The pause is the result of something I've never experienced before: a gross knitting injury.

I guess it's not that gross on the scale of true gross-ness. There's no blood. There is no bone. There is no permanent debilitation. I am startled and put off by it, nonetheless.

I am now going to write about it. So, if you're really squeamish, don't read on. I'm really squeamish and I think it's gross.

I was knitting away on the first sleeve of the sweater. I was knitting, in truth, like mad on the first sleeve of the sweater. My right index finger, pushing at the outgoing stitches, was feeling a little tender. Maybe I was going to get a little blister because I was pushing in basically the same spot over & over. At some point, my sleeve became too small to knit with a single short circular, so I switched over to two circulars. One was the lovely rosewood lantern moon short circular I'd been using for the sleeve up to that point(nice, but slow) and the other was a pink plastic Susan Bates number I'd inherited. I have a bias against plastic needles, but these have a nice sharp point and are just about the right speed for the two-strings-left-hand feat I am attempting. I used the pointy pink plastic on the majority of the body of the sweater.

As I worked my way down (up?) the sleeve, my fingertip got more and more sore. But you know that thing where you get into the groove of something and even if you're experiencing a little bit of physical discomfort, you keep going? You're just so focussed on what you're doing that minor signals from your nerve endings can't reach the significant decision-making portions of your brain? That's where I was.

That's where I was until I actually stopped and looked at my finger. There was no blister. There was a little slit in the skin. A break between my fingerprint whorls. The skin on my finger couldn't hold together. It wasn't deep enough to bleed, but it was deep enough to be registering on some nerves. The nerves were sending "sore" messages to my brain because air was reaching my dermis where air had never been before.

It's not that gross, but by gum if my knitting is causing my skin to split apart at the seams, that's a problem.

So, I've been on a hiatus. I hope to be sufficiently free of split-open-wounds-in-my-fingertips to knit without further incident over the weekend. I only have one more sleeve to go (and all of the interior tidying), so I know it will get done, but I do so wish I were working on it right now!