Pink panda

What is a knitter to do when one of her size 1½ (US) dpns goes AWOL?

Oh, you want to know how the dpn went missing, do you? Well, okay, but then you have to look at my crochet pictures. Fair's fair.

There I was, knitting shotgun on our way north for the weekend. At the point that this story begins, we had already been on the road for an hour and a half longer than the GPS had estimated our trip would take. Since so many people drive south to visit our area's beaches during the summertime, it somehow completely zinged under our radar that other people might want to drive to points north on a holiday weekend to enjoy the fresh mountain air.
If one were to postulate that the presence of sock yarn was the only thing standing between me and insanity, they would be very close to correct. To be truly precise, it was the presence of the sock yarn and the set of size 1½ dpns.

A minor knitting disaster inconvenience struck: I accidentally dropped my dpn and it fell into the small gap between the car door and the door frame.

Oh, bother.

I packed up my SIP and resolved to be very careful opening the door at our destination, so that I might recover the needle for the knit trip home, but the, suddenly, we saw that magnificent rainbow, spanning the entire sky and we pulled over to take some pictures.

The road was rather steeply crowned and the car door pulled itself right out of my grip as soon as I released the latch. No, I didn't even think about the needle: I was trying to get to the back of the minivan to recover the camera so that I could get some photographs before the rainbow faded.

Upon achieving success in my mission, I climbed back into my seat - Number Guy had to hold my left arm so that I wouldn't fall out of the seat while trying to get the door closed with my right arm. Yeah, the road was that tilted.

We arrived at our hotel minutes later, still looking at the colors in the sky. We met the rest of our party there and told everyone to go outside to look at the rainbow.

The knitting needle was totally forgotten in the joy of the rainbow moments.

Fast forward to Sunday morning. There wasn't any time in our schedule at all for knitting on Saturday, so I didn't open the sock bag until we were in the minivan on the way home. I took out the sock and then felt around inside the bag for the fifth needle. It wasn't there. I peered into the bag. Nope, still not there.

Then my memories of Friday night came crashing in upon me like a flashback in a zombie flick.

I only owned one set of six-inch long, size 1½ dpns. Now, I am the proud owner of four size 1½ dpns.

Fortunately, there was a size E crochet hook in my bag and a couple of skeins of Panda Cotton.





It was at this point that I thought I should check my counts. I only had 15 spaces on the first round, so I pulled it back, and fixed the problem.





It continued to grow all the way home.



Until it seemed to eat my sneaker.



I just placed an order for some replacement dpns.