Magic in Progress

This may look like nothing more than a dark circle and a dark rectangle, but looks can be deceiving. This is actually a little knit magic in progress.

Let me tell you about my SnB friend, the incomparable Missus A. This woman:
-- Spends all day in a room full of other people's prepubescent kids. On purpose.

-- Walked sixty (sixty!) miles in three days for a breast cancer walk. If I tried super hard, I might manage that distance in, oh, a couple months. But it would be pushing it.

-- Yeah, and at the end of that walk? She was in the survivor's circle. Let that sink in a moment. Pretty powerful and amazing stuff.

One more thing about Missus A. She's a bit intimidated by cable knitting.

Well, that came as something of a shock to me. Cables? Scary? Nah. Shoot, it's nothing more than knitting the stitches out of order. If you can slip a stitch, you can knit a cable. And it's not like your fingers will catch on fire if you goof it up somehow. It's only knitting.

You know what scares me? A roomful of junior high students. Heck, doesn't have to be a roomful. One or two can make me quake. I mean, do you remember junior high? The cattiness, the giggles and whispers, the monumental importance of lip gloss and training bras. Ugh. All those boys crazed by their first real stiffies, and all those girls in the hormonal madness leading up to a first menses. My god, it was torture. People get permanent psychic scars in that environment.

And yet, Missus A, who is a little scared of cables, suits up and enters that fray every day. She's not just a teacher. She's a warrior.

A warrior who one day, after weeks or months of asserting that cables were amazing and astounding and so forth, asked if I would show her how to knit cables.

Gotta love that courage.

So I suggested we knit a hat together. We picked a cabled hat pattern, the Aran watchcap from Charlene Schurch's "Hats On!" or "Hats Off!" or whatever that book is called. The pattern is fairly simple, just rope cables separated by panels of textured knits and purls. Last week, we cast on.

By our next SnB night, we'll each have knit four inches of single ribbing to start this hat. And that's when the real magic will happen. As knitters have done for generations, we'll sit at a table, and I'll show her a new little technique, and she'll soon catch on to the fact that cables are deceptively simple, nothing more than a knitterly slight of hand.

A magic trick with needles instead of a wand.

But the best magic of all will come from the power she gains from facing something that scares her a little, and doing it anyway.

With so much magic in the air, these are bound to be some pretty fantastic hats.