Arm Knitting

Guys, I should really know better than this by now. I should. Mostly I realize that I am incapable of crafty things, like sewing or candy making or refinishing or hot gluing. But then I see a thing and I think I can do it because it doesn’t involve any special tools.

Image from SimplyMaggie.com

I can knit with my arm. It can’t possibly be as hard as knitting with, you know, needles.

I am a dumbass.

Turns out in arm knitting, your arms are the needles. So now instead of just figuring out how to knit, you also have to figure out how to use your arms while they have yarn tied in knots around them.

But I am getting ahead of myself, because the first deceptively simple step is to create a slipknot.

I don’t consider myself to be an especially stupid person. I made it through college with a fair-to-middling GPA. I can follow the rules of the road. I generally understand when it is socially acceptable for me to make a joke, or if it’s better to shut my damn mouth. Hell, I am even some kind of sailing-certified by the Naval ROTC program at UNC. (Fine, that one is probably just because I was terrible at everything and they felt sorry enough for me to give me a ribbon after my day of sort-of successfully tying knots on a sail boat, but mostly tipping said boat over in the lake.) All of that is to say that a slipknot shouldn’t give me that much trouble.

Shouldn’t. Did.

I had to look up an extra tutorial on slipknots, guys.

But eventually I got it.

Next challenge? Learn how to “cast on.” I have no idea what the fuck that means, even after interminable minutes learning how to do it.

In my first few attempts, I’m pretty sure I was just making loops around my arm.

And, yeah, you guessed it, I had to look up another tutorial on how to do that. The extra tutorial I found was with needles, not arms, but it translated well enough that I sort of managed to make something that looked kinda right-ish… 45 minutes later.

And now it was time to actually knit something, because the whole slipknot and “casting on” thing was not actually knitting, no no.

In the interest of full disclosure, by the time I got this far, I was nearly hyperventilating with frustration, I badly needed a post-lunch nap, and I sort of had to poop. So I was not concentrating fully on my task.

Still, my fuck-upedness exceeded even my own expectations. I shortly managed to tie my wrists together so fully that it took me twenty minutes to get out.

So although the knitting thing failed, I may have a future as a super-villain.

(Also, I tried to get a good picture, but I was out of hands.)

When I finally managed to unloop myself, all that was left was a pile of knotted yarn and a couple of yarn-burned wrists.

And then I gave up, because life is too short to figure some shit out, ya know?