Tuesday, April 18, 2017

Yarn luxury, temporarily thwarted

There has been a lot of yarn stuff going on here at Hugs Central, but it hasn't all been knitting.  Watch this:


This yarn has a gorgeous, gorgeous colour - several colours, in fact, all muted, featuring everything I want to pack in fingerless glove form to go with my green raincoat, new blue jeans, and white handbag when we're on holiday and heading into the Alps or somewhere else that's chilly.  It's dyed by Emily at Viola, whose yarn I save for super special occasions.  And... oops!


Okay sometimes tangles like this happen, but it's not always a total disaster.  If you're really lucky, you can catch a big yarn snarl before it gets worse.

Not this time though! 

Thankfully Pete was on the other side of the yarn winding table watching TV and offered to try to fix it for me, so I went off to make us supper.  When I came back, he looked like he was caught in a yarn snarl blizzard.  He stuck with it all through the evening but that yarn did NOT want to cooperate!

After a couple of days, between the two of us, it got wrestled down to this:


And on the third night I couldn't sleep so I got up and worked at the remaining knots and tangles until it could be caked properly. 


Whew!  All ready to be knit, and not a moment too soon because we leave at the end of the month.

By contrast, the brown yarn I wanted to pack for travel knitting took 15 minutes to cake.


Isn't it beautiful?  There are SO many gorgeous coppery colours in here.  In fact I am struggling with that now because I don't think I want to waste this colour on feet.  Also, this yarn is just a bit finer than my beloved Vesper Sock, and I would have to cast on more stitches to make a comfy sock, which I don't feel like doing.  I think I should make more fingerless gloves with it instead, don't you?


I absolutely love the fingerless gloves pattern I'm using.  It's so simple to knit, just a hand and wrist warmer stripped to the essentials.  And I've been wearing my original pair so much lately, to keep the now-healed fingers on my left hand pliable as I got through the physiotherapy stage, so I am constantly reminded that they super comfortable and pretty to wear, too.

Which leaves me with more decisions because I have rather a lot of Vesper sock yarn already caked for sock-readiness and, since it would be in use only on the ground in places people don't mind knitters, I can just throw some in my bag.  But - which to bring?  I didn't take a picture of this because they are all in little baggies that don't photograph well but there are fourteen possible sets.  They literally spanned the back of our sofa as I set them out to consider what colour combinations I would most want to look at while on a bus on a highway. 

Finally I narrowed them down to three and showed them to my whole family for input and here is what they said - all of them, I mean, even though I asked them independently and they weren't influenced by each other:

First choice, the Vespers that look closest to the colour of the German flag

Second choice, a colourful stripe that is my second choice too

Not even on the leader board: the lovely stripe that is my first choice.  GAH! and this is why it's good to be independently minded.  I mean at least they confirmed my preference for that one colourway.  Still not 100% sure it's the one I'll take, but it's a start.

Or it will be once I get this yarn knit up!


Have you got yarn you can't wait to knit?


1 comment:

Kathy said...

Yes, all of it! Lovely wool, sock yarn, alpaca...... I have far too big a stash. It must be worth hundreds of pounds.