[Note: This should have been posted over a week ago, but we lost the wee dongly thing that lets me take photos from my camera and put them on the computer, so I had to wait ’til a new one came in the post. The next post will feature the rest of the tawashi that I made for Ravelympics.]

I had two major handicaps last week that prevented me from crocheting as much as I would have liked: broken finger was aching something fierce, and a migraine kept me out of the world for three days. I bounced back a little this past weekend, by making a few more tawashi. Two for the kitchen, one for the bath. I made another puzzle knot, like the ones previous, a cookie, and a couple of fruit slices (an apple and an orange).

All that working from a pattern business was making me a little twitchy. I hardly ever use patterns, and my free-form crochet mojo just needed to be indulged. So I decided to make a little wash cloth thing for the shower. I wanted to modify the bath mitt idea. I wanted it to hold the wee pieces of soap that I didn’t want to waste. See, I use expensive and wonderful soap from Lush, so this seemed like a good idea. I started with the bottom of the bag, making a disc shape, then the plan was to decrease from there and continue up the sides in a sort of cylinder type of shape.

First off, I made the bottom disc shape a little too wide. Instead of ripping back and going from there, I decided I’d just decrease a bit more. This turned into a sort of coin shape, and not so much a cylinder. Instead of ripping back, I just kept going, decreasing a little more slowly. By the time I got to the part where I should have bound off, the thing sort of looked like an upside-down cone with the pointy top chopped off. Not what I was going for, but it was good enough to not prompt me to rip back for a do-over. But I still had some yarn left. I knew I wouldn’t use it for anything else, so I decided to just keep going. By the end, it looked like one of those beakers from a chemistry set (the one on the right). Oddly shaped for a bath washy, but whatever, it was done.

It wasn’t very pretty, so I didn’t even think to take a picture of it, or include it among my Ravelympics tawashi. It was just an un-noteworthy one-off experiment. Then I went to use it.

When handmade cotton wash cloths get wet and soapy, they tend to stretch out just a bit. And the formerly firm structure gets a little, well saggy. I washed with it. (It works wonderfully for this purpose, I’d like to note. Wee bits of soap saved!) Then I hung it up by the string at the top. And it just sort of dangled.

This is where I lost it. If I hadn’t been running late for work already, I would have laughed a helluva lot longer than I did. I can’t believe I didn’t notice before. I crocheted a scrotum. A yellow and white cotton scrotum. With which to wash my body.

The week has been devoted to telling as many people as possible that I accidentally crocheted a scrotum. This news, of course, has been met with laughter, incredulity, clever names for the scrubbie, and of course a request for photographic proof. So there you go, world. At first I thought about unraveling it after I’d made my discovery. But now I think I’ll keep it. I’ve sort of resigned myself to washing with a scrotum. It could be a metaphor for life, or something. I dunno.

This, as many of my close friends will remember, is not the first time I have accidentally depicted male genitalia in a crafting experiment. Let us never forget incident with the Venn diagram and dangling oblong shape in the modern art display of 1990. And, just like that eighth grade presentation where everyone laughed at me and wouldn’t tell me why, when I told Jesse about it, he said “Oh, yeah. That’s what I thought when you first showed it to me.”

The next time I accidentally make another set of testicles (and let’s face it, we all know that will eventually happen) please alert me to the nature of my creation. Just tell me: “It’s balls.”