“If you love it so much, why don’t you just marry it?”

WARNING! I officially retracted this endorsement a few weeks after writing it. See the retraction here. My nerdly excitement was so endearing, though, that I’m keeping this post around as an object lesson. Read on.

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If you are both a parent and a knitter, and your status as a knitter precedes your status as a parent, then you are familiar with this phenomenon: as soon as your child(ren) arrived, all of the objects in your house mysteriously rearranged themselves. Nothing was where you left it, and nothing stayed where you put it. Not your house keys, not your wallet, not your glasses, not your underwear, and certainly not your shoes. If you were lucky enough to have some time to knit, then you probably discovered that your notions had suffered the same fate.

I was never much good at keeping all of my notions in one place anyway, but as soon as Miss M and Mr. S arrived, my notions bag somehow emptied itself out. My needle gauge ended up under the bed, my stitch markers were in the bathroom, and my scissors . . . well, I won’t tell you where I found my scissors. It’s enough to say that every time I managed to sit down to knit, I had to get up another five or six times to find whatever stupid notion I’d lost.

Enter The Knit Kit. Back in February, Z discovered an advertisement for The Knit Kit on Ravelry, and she quickly discerned that it combined two of my favorite things: knitting notions and well-designed gadgetry (she also discerned that I wouldn’t want to share it once I had it, so she wisely ordered two of them). And she was correct.

I don’t usually use this space to shamelessly plug other people’s products (only my own), but The Knit Kit has saved me from wasting my precious knitting time. Since our Knit Knits arrived in the mail, I cannot tell you the number of times I’ve sat down to knit and suddenly thought, “Oh crap! Where are my sciss——” or “Oh crap! I forgot to grab my stitch mar——” only to follow it up with, “Wait! I have it right here! My life is not ruined after all!”

It’s not just the convenience, though. The designers of The Knit Kit gave it a few strokes of genius, not the least of which is the fact that the lock on the row counter actually works, and the little dials for the numbers are recessed, which means that tossing the Knit Kit into your notions bag won’t somehow magically advance you five rows ahead in your pattern.

Now, in case you’re wondering whether I’ve taken money to write this post, let me tell you my three complaints. Firstly, there is one notion missing from The Knit Kit: a gauge checker. It’s a little unfair to complain about this, though, since I’m not really sure where they would have put it, or how it would have fit. Number two: the pink accent is . . . well, pink. Never mind the gender issue, the number of locations that one can get away with the color pink is few and far between. The Knit Kit’s pink isn’t offensive, mind you, but it’s just . . . pink.

And number three? The Knit Kit bears an unfortunate resemblance, in appearance and feel, to another convenient carrying case:

But maybe this isn’t a criticism. Nothing wrong with being associated with sexual liberation, right? Which isn’t all you’ll be supporting if you buy The Knit Kit; you’ll be supporting intelligent design. The real kind.