Jon's Knit Blog

4/7 of a Scarf

I made it through the rest of the first skein of cardinal, all the Neptune as well as the Floretina.

Here is a close-up, which has decent-ish color representation...

The yarn, while lovely, is, as I have said before, truly a pain to work with. It will create a great spring/fall scarf. I love the weight of it and the way it drapes, and the colors are lovely. But winding it?

Here are the instructions from the "ball" band:

"Mercury by name: mercury by nature. This yarn is liquid and will flow into its own form and tangle if set free. So be in control! Undo label and holding the yarn by the ties place over the back of a chair. Wind into a ball: do not attempt to wind this on a yarn swift. Place in a small plastic bag and tie the back tightly around the ball. Punch a hole in the plastic and feed yarn end through. You are now ready to get knitting tangle-free..."

Yeah right. Granted, I haven't used a plastic bag, but I tried a sock. (I didn't even FIND these instructions until the winding of the fourth ball.) The sock didn't work great. There is another problem besides the liquid nature of the yarn, which is the fact that the ribbon yarn is hypersensitive to being twisted, so you basically have to stop knitting every few rows and un-twist the section between the knitting and the ball.

For the next skein, I'm going to try leaving it on the ball winder and just "unwinding" it from there directly to my knitting fingers. Still, I'll probably have to rewind it a couple times. Heck, I had to wind the second and third skein three times each, and luckily the fourth skein only once. Oddly enough, the first skein, once I got it wound, knit up fairly cleanly. Let's hope the rest are more like the first... And let's hope that the next time I choose a project to be "simply mindless knitting," it really is.

PS: Isn't it ironic that I'm posting this entry, called "4/7 of a scarf" on 4/7? Hehe...

Posted by Jon at April 7, 2004 12:44 AM