yarn carnage

It’s a long weekend here, and long weekends mean two things: the weather turns rubbish; and somehow I manage to waste so much time on some ridiculous venture that I achieve nothing useful all weekend, and may as well have been at work.

True to form, the cold weather has returned, and I spent many many hours on Sunday night and Monday morning trying to retrieve a very very bad yarn situation.

It all revolved around a skein of Posh Yarn Cecilia in a medium cool green colour, a recent purchase from a destasher on eBay.  I completely fell in love with this yarn once I saw the sample knit of Dark Red Pretties from A Stitch in Time, which uses the most beautiful red.  I was happy to finally get my hands on some, as I can’t face the Posh Yarn update frenzy to buy some direct from the website.

Sadly the yarn was in a far from pristine condition when I got it, and looked as if someone had spilled their dinner on it or something equally disgusting.  No problem, just gave it a quick soak in cool water, and hung it up to dry for a day or so.

I didn’t think to check if the skein was tied properly.  Turns out, it wasn’t.  The strands of yarn looked a bit squiggly and unruly after the wash, so I set about re-skeining it.

Oh dear.  Cobweb laceweight cashmere/silk is delicate stuff.  It’s light, it’s soft, and it loves to stick to itself.  Every time I touched the yarn it got worse, until I ended up with a gigantic pile of yarn ramen.  It was horrendous.  My flatmate came home, shook her head, and said that I must be incredibly patient.  Well, I’m not, and I absolutely hate untangling yarn.   So I took the scissors to it.

Uh-oh.  I’d hoped that cutting through the really tangly outside bits would leave me with a nice neat section of yarn to work with.  Nope.  Once I started trying to remove all the bits I’d sliced and diced, the rest of the yarn just kept tangling.  It was wasn’t playing fair.  Every few minutes or so I considered just throwing the whole lot in the bin, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.  It’s hand-dyed!  It’s cashmere and silk! I couldn’t let it just go to waste.

It was in such a state that I finally gave up at 2am, and tried again in the morning.  Half a day went by before I managed to salvage something of the yarn.  After untold hours (I refuse to count just how many; it would make me cry) I finally reached the end.

I still had a giant ball of yarn carnage:

But at least I had some usable yarn too.  Compared to the noodley scraps it doesn’t look like much, but I saved 77g of the 100g skein.

Considering that a big chunk of my long weekend was devoted to this squiggly mess, I’m not sure it was quite worth it.   I definitely won’t be wanting to knit with it for some time, that’s for certain.