I did not expect that.

Okay, that was obvious, given what happened, or I’d have been more careful: I got a few hours into a project last night in silk (allergies, recipient-wise, exactly why I buy the stuff) and on our way out the door this morning I stuffed it in a plastic bag and stuffed that in my purse.

Without zipping the ziploc. Opening went straight up.

When we got to church, I realized that I had somehow caught the length of yarn between the project and the cone outward and I’d run the purse zipper right over it. In two places.

That stopped me right there a moment while I took in the enormity of what I had just done.

I carefully tried every trick I knew to disengage them, but the silk was not tightly plied and as the threads bunched into a tangly lot on themselves that I was all too familiar with and the zipper utterly jammed I knew the thing was doomed. Or at least that part of it. The purse itself was old and not in such great shape itself and the last one had died a zippery death. Great.

It was a big group today with two wards mashed together because our building had been taken over by the annual creche exhibit, a museum for a week. Which is why the timing of the drive to church was a tad uncertain and why I’d brought the knitting.

At Sunday School, an hour and a half later, I found myself sitting next to two friends to one side and showed them… It didn’t really need an explanation, just one look at the thing and we all know when Christmas is, and I put it back down, grateful for a moment’s camaraderie over the thing, at least. I would have to take it home, cut it, carefully work back so many stitches, and then make an unwanted knot with dozens of tiny little silky ends sprouting out of the thing over time–it’s hardly the grippiest fiber. Hardly the end of the world, either, but utterly self-inflicted.

At the end of Sunday School I found myself picking up my purse again, thinking I could just try one more time–and that zipper sailed smoothly right out of the way, freeing the yarn completely out of its prison. Wait what?! Purse in lap, I picked up  either end of where the yarn had been caught, disbelieving, and gave it the most gentle tug just to be sure–

–and it was perfect. The tangle had stretched out and right back into perfect order like a model’s hairstyle coming out of a dressing room on the set. It could not be, and yet, and I wanted to jump up and down and yell LOOK AT THAT!!! to the whole room. But what I did do was turn to my friends, the farther of whom had no idea in the noise and distraction of the room just then, and I exclaimed to the nearer one, “Someone just said a prayer because that wasn’t going to happen!”

She burst out laughing. Busted. Yes, yes she had, she allowed, as delighted as I was for me, for the outcome, for a tiny but major-to-me-and-she-knew-it Christmas miracle. One I had been too frustrated to think to ask for myself so she’d done it for me.

And there you go. And it stayed perfect as  I later knitted it up.

Wow.