We don't make Mistakes

We are in the process of really tidying up the garden in preparation for Jenny's 18th barbecue, of course, that's assuming it doesn't pour with rain and all has to be moved inside. So, today we were at the garden centre, trying not to spend too much money when I saw this sign:

         "We don't make Mistakes

            We do Variations"

This needs to be my motto, especially where knitting is concerned. If its obvious I will take back, but more  often I try to fix it. Last night I discovered another error in Love Potion 1, somehow I'd managed to loose 2 stitches! Lost a YO I think. This shawl, for something so intrinsically simple, seems to be fraught with challenges.

The other challenge I'm facing is the one I've set myself. The memory game. Earliest memory? It's difficult at this distance to know what is truth and what has been varied over time. I remember:

• Being carried on my Dads shoulders when on a walk to the beach
• Eating too many sherbet lemons
• Always being ill at Christmas, bronchitis, but I think it was what we now call asthma
• Mum throwing away a toy make up case, I couldn't get it back cos it had gone in the furnace that was used to heat our water. I cried
• My new bike that was hidden in the big meat freezer until my birthday, (actually it wasn't new but refurbished and repainted, but I loved it).

All of these memories are in some way linked with the flat above the shop, and we moved out of there when I was 8, so fairly early ones. The one that carries most emotion from that early time was when I had to go into hospital, I think to have my tonsils out, I had to stay in overnight. The nurses brought dolls in as presents for me and the girl in the next bed, presumably supplied by our respective parents. She got a massive one, with long curly hair, eyes that moved  and that you could undress. I got a small plastic one with a home knitted dress. I cried and cried, but I never got a bigger doll and simply got told I would make myself sick. I've still got that doll somewhere too, it's got a yellow and pink crinoline dress.

You've probably worked out by now that I am a hoarder. Not of real rubbish, but I find it incredibly difficult to get rid of anything I've been given.