Monday, July 20, 2020

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.

18 comments:

  1. I so often miss the obvious that it's a wonder my husband hasn't given up on me. Heh... I'm glad you finally got it sorted.

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    1. Me too. It would have been a shame to throw it away.

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  2. I've had days like that with my cross-stitching thread. You just want to work on your project, but no. It's one big knot. You don't know how it happened. It was fine when you put it away yesterday.

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  3. All knitters and sewing people are tenacious. I have done that in quilting, giving up only when I have made too many decisions that go awry.

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    1. I rarely give up completely. There's usually a way to fit it ;)

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  4. Congrats on post 2900!! That was a big tangle of yarn!

    Betty

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  5. I've had some epic tangles in my 50 plus years of crocheting. I have learned, slowly but surely, to just cut the yarn and deal with it. I'm not sure how much harder it is with knitting than with crocheting (never having succeeded in learning to knit). But still...I can't just cut. I have to try. And sometimes I take it through an entire evening. Incidentally, I haven't checked my stats recently so I found that, as of today, I have 3909 published posts. Why didn't I look sooner? Congrats on your 2900th.

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    1. It's just luck that I happened to notice I was approaching 2900 last week. I almost didn't mention it.

      About cutting, I do hate weaving in ends, so I tried my darnedest to get that untangled. Alas, in the end it became necessary.

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  6. Wowee! 2900th post is tremendous. I mean, untangling the messed up half-pile/half-skein is tremendous too, but 2900 posts is epic.Congrats!

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  7. I don't knit, but I can well imaging how disconcerting a tangle can be!

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  8. Congrats on your 2900th post! That's a huge accomplishment. And you were truly dedicated to getting your yarn detangled. Not sure I would have been so dedicated.

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  9. How crazy that we always forget to do the act that would save us so much time and heartache. Glad it all got unwound

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  10. Congrats on the number of post . I wish you the best take care

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  11. The challenge of the untangling of yarn! :-)

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