Monday, November 18, 2013

An expensive mistake



See that? That my friends is a 30 dollar skein of beautiful hand dyed wool yarn that was supposed to be a honey cowl. What is it now? A horrific, giant, ugly 30 dollar knot that took about 2 weeks to make. I could cry.

Ugh.

It started off simple enough, I was going to make the short version of the honey cowl and simply make it wider. The yarn has a lovely drape and I adore the color so I was super excited about it. After a few rows I realized that I had it twisted, but I thought "no biggie, it can just be a honey mobius". After finishing it and casting off, I realized that it was not only twisted once, but easily three times.  

Was it still wearable? Yes, I could have easily adjusted it and it would have been fine since I made it so wide. But, after spending the money on it (30 dollars can buy a lot of different things as far as I'm concerned), I thought I would just pull it out and start over, having learned , my lesson to be more careful (I'm still very much a novice when it comes to knitting). About 30 seconds in the whole plan went to hell quickly...apparently I do not know how to unravel a cowl. It ended up a giant mess, horrifically knotted and I'm fairly sure not salvageable. 

You live you learn. Since this debacle I did some more Googling about how to keep the rows from twisting in the round. Hopefully I will avoid this mistake again. Sometimes you have to laugh I suppose :) 




3 comments:

Michelle said...

How did the unraveling go so wrong? I've had yarns that were sticky and didn't want to let go (freezing can help with that), but that's been my worst problem undoing projects.

Twisting stitches terrifies me. I usually knit a couple of rows flat before joining.

Sarah Fredette said...

I hope you didn't throw it out in despair! It is still salvageable, it will just take lots of time and patience.

I've found rolling it into a ball while I'm unravelling to be very helpful.

Houseful Of Nicholes said...

Please don't throw it out (I know that I'm late) but I had a crocheting mistake (I know, not the same type of stitching) that had a huge knotted mess, and it took my husband and me over three hours to unravel. And that skein was only $4. We're rooting you on! You can do it!