My Terrible, Horrible, No-good, Very Bad Day

The day started innocently enough. After I'd had my coffee and read the newspaper, checked Facebook and played a game or two of Words with Friends, I decided to wind a hank of yarn into a cake. I'd had "nothing on my needles," as we knitters say, for a full 24 hours, and I was eager to launch a new project.

Side note: At left, above is a hank of yarn, but not the one featured in this story.

One cannot knit from a hank of yarn. If one tries, one finds oneself in a pickle. The yarn tangles mercilessly.

So I got out my yarn swift and my ball winder, and undid the ties on the hank of beautiful, hand-dyed  aqua "Caper Lace" yarn by String Theory, which happens to be made right here in Maine. I bought this yarn at the Maine Fiber Festival in 2014 and have been waiting to find JUST the right  project worthy of it.

I'd found the project: the September Circle cowl, by Melissa LaBarre. The pattern is beautiful and it has received rave reviews, so what could go wrong? Well, the following could go wrong:

1. I managed to screw up the yarn while carefully, I thought, placing it on the swift. I cranked the handle of the yarn winder a few times before the yarn started pulling, refusing to be wound, and tangling. I stopped the winding, untangled the yarn, and resumed winding. This went on for quite a few seconds: wind, stop, untangle, wind. Finally I realized things were getting worse, not better, so I removed the hank of precious String Theory Caper Lace yarn, $29 a hank, by the way, from the winder and decided to wind it into a ball by hand.

Five hours later (yes, five hours. The hank contains 575 YARDS of lace-weight yarn, and the hank was now a mess of tangled spaghetti on my sofa. If this had been a skein of, say Red Heart yarn, I would have tossed it into the trash and bought a new skein the next time I went to AC Moore. But this was no skein of ordinary yarn; it was a skein, as I might have mentioned already, of precious String Theory yarn, purchased not simply at the Maine Fiber Festival, but at the festival I attended with my dear friend Margaret, a fellow knitter who was visiting me from England. This skein cost $29, which I might have mentioned already,  and it had much sentimental value.

So I meticulously untangled the yarn for five solid hours. As 1:30 p.m. loomed and I'd done nothing but untangle a mess of lace-weight yarn most of the day, I told myself I'd work just until 2:00, and if I hadn't finished untangling the mess, I'd call it quits for the day and try again another day. At 2:00, however, the end was in sight, so I forged onward and finally, FINALLY finished untangling the yarn at 2:30. It was now wound into a neat ball.

That evening, while watching the news, I felt my blood pressure had returned to relative normal and my nerves were relatively calm, so I would cast on for the September Circle cowl. I would cast on all 216 stitches, I told myself, and knit a row or two to get this project under way.

I selected a 24" size 7 circular needle, rejoiced when I discovered it was a Knitters' Pride cubics circular, and began casting on, using the long-tail cast-on method. With the long-tail cast-on, one works with only one end of the circular needle set. So I held the needle in my right hand and blissfully cast on. (This bit of information is crucial to your understanding what happened next):

2.  After I'd cast on oh, maybe 199 of the 216 stitches, I looked at the other end of the circular needle set and discovered, to my utter horror, the needle was missing. That's right, the needle had broken off. You can't knit with a set of circular needles if you have, sadly, a needle on one end and a missing needle on the other. (See photo at left.)


For some reason, however, I managed to remain optimistic. I hadn't shed a single tear.) Admittedly, I might have uttered a curse word or two or fifty, but I'd done it softly and, I'm sure, the neighbors were none the wiser.) I calmly slid my 199 stitches to a new set of 24" circulars, size 7, finished casting on the remaining stitches, and prepared to knit the first row.

All seemed to be well. I knit not only the first row, but the second, the third, the fourth. All was good.

Then I began to get suspicious. As I tried to straighten out the needles and cable to admire the pattern that was developing, I noticed the needles/cable were, uh, very reluctant, shall I say, to straighten out and form a nice, neat circle.

3. Then my worst fear was realized: I'd been happily knitting not a circular cowl, but a mobius strip.

I was tempted to leave it as is. After all, it's going to become (I continue to believe) a cowl, and cowls are wrapped and even twisted to lie attractively at the neck.

My better sense prevailed, though, and I raveled the entire 216 stitches X four rows = 864 stitches, put this yarn back onto the ball by hand, and once again cast on 216 stitches.

This time, though, I used a set of circular needles with a needle on each end and I checked not once, but at least four times, to make sure I didn't have another mobius strip in the making.

So that was my terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day. The cowl seems to be progressing nicely at this point, but I'm keeping my optimism in check.