Though there hasn’t been much blogging going on recently, there has been an awful lot of knitting . . . mainly on my Goddess Knits Anniversary Mystery Shawl, now also known as Mandala. Sadly, as with most lace projects, there is little visible progress since my last photo and the thing still looks like a giant blob. I only know that I’m making progress because I’m checking off row after row of the giant chart 4 (96 rows!) and watching my third skein shrink down to nothing. I was expecting that three skeins would do it, but luckily, thanks to the generosity of fellow Ravelers, I had a fourth skein on standby.
Last night, with just a tiny length of yarn hanging off of my shawl, I put the fourth skein on my swift and realized immediately that I had a huge problem. Several rounds of yarn had been cut or perhaps broken, and the whole thing was a gigantic stringy mess. Not sure what to do, I grabbed the first strand I could find and started winding. This approach worked well until after about twenty cranks of the ball winder the tail-end of the yarn appeared. Although I now had one neatly-wound ball, I also had a bunch of unwound strands that were tangling around the bottom of the swift and generally looking knotty. I admit I was tempted to just toss the whole thing, but I needed the skein to finish my shawl.
It was a painstaking process, but finally I managed to wrestle each snipped strand off of the main skein and was able to salvage a medium-sized center pull ball in addition to a whole bunch of mini-balls.
Hopefully I’ll be able to finish the project with just one more splice!
Type-K 