Danger, it's my Middle Name

Whenever I tell this story I get the same reaction: “Why have you not shared this story with everyone?!” So here it goes:

I crochet, I don’t knit.  There is a distinction but no one is interested in that. I have been crocheting for about 6 years and I have only semi-injured myself once and it was a doozy:

There is a hook used for tapestry crochet that is a good bit longer than most crochet hooks. I don’t use it for tapestry crochet because I don’t know how to tapestry crochet so I use it for every day crocheting. I like the weight to it and I use it a lot.

It was a few months before Christmas when I was fiendishly crocheting to get all my gifts done by Christmas. This didn’t happen, but I tried my best. Since I was out of work, ALL gifts were being made by hand. And I had a lot to get through. So one evening I was home alone and I sat down with an alcoholic beverage and my yarn and hook.

I suppose I need to add here that this wasn’t my first alcoholic beverage of the night, and I can’t exactly tell you if this had anything to do with the events that transpired.  I looked down to refer back to my pattern and BAM! Long, heavy crochet hook right in my left eye.  It wasn’t an eye poke that really hurt or anything it was an eye poke that poked my eye out.

Yes, you read that correctly. The hook hit right underneath my eyeball, in between my eye socket and eye, propelling my eye forward. Not enough to where it was hanging out of my skull or anything, but enough that I could feel that something was wrong. Very, very wrong.

I sat there for a second to process what had happened. I was freaking out for a minute but completely unsure of how bad the damage really was. I got up slowly, like that really mattered, and I walked over to the nearest mirror. It was there I saw that my left eye was poking out ever so slightly. It felt weird and foreign in my head but I thought I was just freaking out since I, you know, poked my eye out. I calmly took my left hand and pushed my eye back into the socket.  It was weird and it gave me the willies for the rest of the night.  After I replaced my eye, I put the yarn and hook down for the rest of the night, Christmas gifts be damned.

This story came to mind yesterday when Garrett, pretending to crochet*, was playing with the tapestry crochet hook when I immediately stopped him and took it from him. He asked why, of course, and I explained to him that I once poked my eye out with that same hook. His response, “Why have you not told me this?!”

* He doesn’t actually want to know how to crochet, he just wants to tell me that what I am doing is wrong. Seriously. He will show me what he is doing, which is nothing, and tell me “See, this isn’t that hard, I can do it.”