#knittingdangerously

In a knitting related death that illustrates the dangers of Fair Isle, Sarah died late last Sunday night, she was in her fortieth year.

For the past month Sarah had been working on a pair of four-colour stranded half-mitts. The mitts had no tops, and a simple thumb, making the snaggles of multi-coloured yarn the only tricky part of the knitting. She had upped the ante by knitting them on the same needles, meaning eight threads of yarn were swirling around her like a woolly tornado each night.

Sarah’s eagerness to finish the mittens was evident. The weather had been warming up recently, and she wanted her daughter to have a reason to wear the mushroom-themed hand warmers (although her daughter’s loyalty for wearing hand knits goes beyond comfort – she is willing to wear wool regardless of the practical considerations of weather, but based on her mother’s direction).

“We were really relieved when the knitting was done,” Sarah’s husband said. “We thought we were through the danger when she bound off that ribbing...”

Alas, no one had considered the obvious threat of weaving in all those ends. Sarah took great care to make those ends invisible. Her tension remained perfect. The mushroom pattern stayed even across the mitts, but sadly and unintentionally Sarah wove herself tightly into the wrong-side of the right-hand mitt where she quickly suffocated.