Once upon a time there was a sweater pattern and a hopeful, young maiden and a gauge square. An evil, villainous, treacherous gauge square that lied all the time.
Alright, so maybe it wasn’t entirely evil, this gauge square. Maybe it had its own side of the story to tell. And maybe the maiden wasn’t quite so blushingly youthful and maidenish as she’d like you to believe... Oh, shut it. This is my story. Gregory Maguire can tell it the other way if he likes. Looks like he’s hard up for material these days.
The point is that this maiden made a sweater based on the glowing promises of the evil gauge square and it came out big enough to fit Hagrid’s girlfriend... with growing room. The bereaved maiden had no recourse left to her but to frog it and begin again with a heavy, sad heart.
The maiden had been planning on buying some celebratory boots from the local cobbler in commemoration of her first-ever completed sweater. She bought the boots anyway. Preemptive, celebratory boots. There had been this precedent set by an evil dictator, you see. But that’s neither here nor there.
The point is she wore her preemptive, celebratory boots while she frogged the whole damn sweater, alternatively sobbing into her 100% merino yarn and cursing the treacherous gauge square which was tricksy and false and had led her so far astray. She nailed the gauge square to the wall in a compromising position and flung insults at it periodically and she slowly re-crocheted the sweater. Many months passed.
Then, one day, a festival was due to come to the maiden’s village and she undertook a sacred vow to finish the sweater in time to wear to the festival. Then she told all the ladies in her knitting group so she couldn’t wiggle out of it.
And on the eve of the festival, the sweater was finished. And it fit. And the gauge square went into the garbage can so it could spend a long lifetime rotting and festering away in a forgotten, odiferous wasteland saved especially for banana peels, rotten tomatoes, and very bad gauge squares who tell lies.
