A lesson to be learnt ....

When you're knitting and once again(will you never learn?) you decide to ignore what the pattern says and keep all your stitches on holders so when it comes to knitting the surplice yoke, you have bits of wool hanging everywhere and slightly alarming gaps between the back, two fronts and the sleeves of the little cardy, so then you decide to lay it all down on a hard surface so you can at least sew a couple of the raglan edges together to make it easier to work the yoke, and when the dining table is full of magazines, papers, laptops etc. and you then make the rather (in hindsight) stupid decision on lay it out on the kitchen bench, DO NOT do so when you're also in the middle of cooking spaghetti sauce, or you'll end up with something like this .....



And of course you can't get the stains out because your sauce has tomato paste, red wine and goodness knows what else in it and you dap gently at the stains with cold water, make them worse (naturally) and then finally give up and decide to knit the back again only to realise that you'll then have a major problem as everything is gathered together on the needle at the most important yoke stage so it's not just a simple "replace one piece" scenario.

So then you make the drastic decision to cut the offending piece off - you thought about unravelling it but decided it was easier just to attack it with the scissors which sort of worked, once you'd picked off all the tiny little bits of wool, picked up the stitches and worked out which row you ended up on, then started to knit from the armholes back down til you reached the ribbing which needed to be done on the smaller needles, of which you only have one pair and one of the pair is holding all the yoke stitches - which is how I ended up with this delightful mess !@#$%