I knit. I don't know how I came to enjoy knitting so much, especially since I live in a convection oven. There isn't much demand for knitted goods around here, so I end up giving quite a few things away.

I recently finished this hat. It was a nightmare to work on. My kids kept getting at it, and pulling my work off of the needles, which meant I had to go through the painstaking process of placing each stitch back on the needle making sure that I don't miss any, and that they are all facing the right direction.

The worst part was when I was a little less than halfway finished with the cabled part, I noticed a mistake. On one row, over four stitches, I purled instead of knitted (for the uninitiated that means I made loops that went the wrong direction).  This meant that instead of the bumpy texture covering most of the hat, a small area had a smooth texture. The worst part is that I didn't notice my error until I had completed several more rows of work.

At first I kept going, thinking to myself that it wasn't that big of a mistake, and no one would notice, and and and.  After another inch or so worth of work I was so distracted thinking about my first mistake that I made another mistake. Finally I admitted to myself that I would never be happy with the hat unless I went back and fixed it while it would be relatively easy. So I gritted my teeth and ripped out a good two inches worth of the most complex cable pattern I've ever done. This was a very difficult thing for me to do, and it set me back considerably.

I developed a sort of mental block against working on the hat, I didn't even want to look at it. More than once I considered giving up on it altogether- undoing the whole thing and using the yarn for something else.

A few nights ago I swallowed my discomfort and sat down to work on it until it was done. Now I have a technically perfect hat- it is exactly what it was meant to be. Because of that mistake, and taking the time to go back and fix it, this hat took much longer to complete than it should have. Despite that, I'm still left with a perfect hat.

I call it my repentance hat.