The Tangle

This is my 2900th post. 

Remember my "knitting" picture from last week? 

Since then, I have maybe added an inch to this. (And no, I'm not talking about what it is yet.) 

For the week, that was all of the knitting I did. 

It's not that I didn't have time to knit. It was that my yarn got into the worst tangle... 

Honestly, I should have prepped better. When I pulled the yarn out of my stash, it was a mess. I had three "skeins". One was a full skein, still with it's ball band. One was just a pile of yarn. And one was half skein, half pile. 

I took the pile and wound it into a ball. The full skein was perfectly sorted. 

The half skein, half pile was where I made my fatal mistake. 

I thought about pulling it all out and making a ball. But I wanted to get started knitting. So, I took the pile part and wound it around the skein, (No, I didn't take a picture of this. If I had known...) I figured it was sorted well enough. 

I started knitting. Things went well for what is in the first picture. But about two days after that picture was taken, the half skein got to the portion where I had wound the yarn, and I hit a tangle. 

No problem. I cut the yarn, untangled, and kept going. 

But then the tangle got worse. 

So, instead of continuing on, I figured I'd take a half hour and rewind that yarn into a ball. 

This took me three days. 

(Well, not full days. Three days of knitting time. So, all told, probably ten hours.) 

I felt sure I'd finish the first night, even once I got into hour three. But at about 1 AM, I called it. I had to be up for work (from home, but still). And I thought I'd finish the next night, no problem. 

The second night, I got stuck with this knot. I don't know how it got knotted so bad considering that at no point did I knot the thing. I tugged and shifted and pulled for a good hour, but again, at 1 AM I called it. 

That was when I considered cutting the yarn again. But I didn't think I was that far gone. 

The third night I cut the yarn. After that, I was able to unknot the worst of the tangle with ease. 

Why didn't I cut earlier? I was trying to avoid more ends to wind in at the end. And I didn't think of it. It's funny what obvious solutions don't occur when one is in the thick of doing something. 

So, nothing exciting happened in my knitting last week. I need to make more masks or something, or I'm not going to have anything to write on Mondays for a while.