The Yarn Barf

For some reason, I was having trouble finding the inside end of my balls of yarn. The outside end was usually sitting there in plain sight, practically waving at me, so I would go ahead and knit with it. What a pain, every time I needed more yarn, I had to pick up the ball and unwind some before I could knit more. If I was careless and tugged without thinking, the ball would bounce from my chair arm and roll across the floor -- usually chased by a cat with evil intent.

I have seen cute little jars with holes in the top and pretty little bags to hold yarn balls, but they sure wouldn't work as intended if the ball had to roll around to release its yarn.

Then, I don't remember were, I read the term "Yarn Barf."

O frabjous day! It wasn't me, it was the way the balls and skeins were constructed!

So now I stuff my index finger right down the yarn's throat and make it cough up the yarn barf.

Sometimes it takes a whole lot more untangling than I would like, but it sure beats having a yarn ball bouncing and rolling and fighting the cats for it.







P.S. The link above is to Lewis Carroll's poem "Jabberwocky."

Slimy Little Secrets

I haven't been knitting long, but since I learned how to perl and opened the door to the wonderful world of two needles and yarn, I've been surfing the web gathering bits and pieces of information.

Noro Yarn, knitting socks and felting your knitting are very in. Some patterns are written in cryptic text abreviations and some are drawn in even more cryptic symbols on graphs. Frog means to unravel knitting, as inspired by, "Rip it, rip it," and to tink is not to tinker, it's to unknit or knit backwards. Boy, have I been doing a whole lot of both of those.

Knitting Help.com is a way cool site. They have videos of how to do things -- in both English/American and Continental. It was good to find out I'm not the only person who holds the yarn in her left hand and to see how others do it.

One of the coolest/weirdest things I've learned about is "spit splicing."

If you're using the right yarn, it's got to be wool or other animal fiber and it cannot be treated to make it washable, you can work magic with a little spit and elbow grease.

First you untwist a couple inches of the yarn plies and take half of them away. My terribly sophisticated technique is to rub one blade of my scissors back and forth over the place I want to cut until it breaks away all raggedy -- you want and need that fuzzy stuff.

Then you wrap the two unraveled ends over each other and spit on 'em good.
Put the soggy yarn in the palm of one hand and rub the other hand back and forth over it like you were trying to give it (what the kids in my neighborhood called) an Indian Burn. It gets real hot.

Bingo! One strand of yarn where once there were two! And it's tough, it doesn't easily pull apart. The texture is not as soft as the un-spat-upon yarn, but when it's knit, who can tell... Here it is knit into the red scarf. It's not easy to find. It's way neater than weaving in the ends.

You can do it with just plain water too, but that just doesn't tickle my perversity. I get an evil little jolly out of knowing somebody's wearing my spit.

Baby Bootie Blues

I knit the first baby bootie a couple of weeks ago then paused in that endeavour to knit the hat for my brother.

Now I can't seem to match the tension on the first bootie.

I tried once, it was too big.

The yarn is really fuzzy, so it tangles with itself when knitted and is almost impossible to unravel, so I had to frog the slipper and start over.

I tried again, it was too small. But I caught that one after only a half-dozen rows.

Frogged it again.

I hope, like Goldylocks, I finally find one that's just right. Because this is really old yarn and it isn't being made any more.

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As an aside: Frogging, to frog, I frogged that sucker. I have interpreted that to mean scragged with venom in knitting parlance. I suspect it stands in for stronger words.

I do it frequently. I like having a colorful word for it.