No more twist!

11:00 pm, and just done with square 6 of strip 13. I had planned on staying up in to the wee hours working on it, though a moment of futility struck me. I only have enough yarn to maybe get me through this strip, anyway! Is it worth ruining my stomach and making me waste a whole day afterwards recovering? Maybe so... I would only have to work until I ran out of yarn, right? And I'd kind of like to prove to myself that I'm still young, I can still do wild and stupid things like stay up until sunrise and function the next day.

And all the while, I can't get The Tailor of Gloucester out of my head. That little Beatrice Potter story. It was one of my favorite stories as a little bat-tyke. You may remember it. If you're up for a fun bit of story time, you can read it here. Clever little mice help out a poor, old tailor, sewing his soon-due commissioned piece which he despaired of finishing due to the lack of one buttonhole's worth of cherry-colored silk. What knitter can't love and appreciate that?

What I find even cuter is the true story of the Tailor of Gloucester. Seems his young apprentices partied a bit too hard at the nearby pubs after work one night and had to crash on the sewing room floor. To either recompense their employer for the intrusion, or maybe just to give an excuse for why they were there that night, they stitched up the jacket he was commissioned to do. But they ran out of thread for the buttonholes before sewing the last one. In tiny, probably quite hung-over script, they wrote "no more twist" and pinned it to the last buttonhole. When the tailor came in and saw the miraculously completed jacket and the tiny little note. Why, who else could have done it but elves or little mice? I can just see the apprentices' nervous glances to one another. Apparently the tailor made a mint from boasting his magically mouse-made garments. Everyone needs a niche, eh?

But that little diversion leads me to another interpretation of "no more twist." The twist in my wrists! It's nearly dead at this point. My finger tips can still flutter, but without the wrist-twist, my knitting motion's going into my elbows and shoulders, and boy are they complaining. This little typing interlude has helped re-awaken things. Let's see if I can't run out of yarn before the sun shows up.