Knot Defeated

Every now and then there is something rather small that begins to get the better of me, and I refuse to let it. However, while I am busy refusing defeat, I spiral downward into an angry, muttering-under-my-breath obsession, which almost never leads to victory.

Last night was not one of my finer moments. 'Tis the season for crochet, and I have been doing a lot of it lately. I have many projects with deadlines this time of year, and I hate wasting my time on a stubborn skein of yarn. That's right, I call it a "skein" no matter how dorky, nerdy, old that makes me sound. By stubborn, I mean that one skein of yarn that absolutely refuses to unravel in an orderly fashion, the kind that you have to untie, and de-knot every couple of stitches.

I began the scarf sometime around the end of Grey's Anatomy, so, let's say 9:45 pm, for the sake of a timeline here. I had only gotten through the first row when I noticed that the opposite end of the yarn was rapidly twisting and wrapping around the yarn I was trying to stitch with. This may not make any sense to most of you, but it was incredibly annoying. Every few stitches I had to go back and unravel and untwist the back end of the yarn. I finally became so frustrated with it that I was determined to fix it. I foolishly thought that if I just pulled the end out the other side, the twisting and knotting would cease. That seems simple enough, right?

See, it began looking like this:

There's a nice little string poking out at you, fooling you into believing that if you just pull on it, it will come and unravel nicely while you stitch. However when I pulled and stitched, the skein began collapsing tightly into itself as though some unseen suction had a hold of my yarn, or perhaps the yarn had it's own gravitational pull. Hard to say, really. I wish I had taken pictures of the whole process, but alas, I was in my angry, muttering-under-my-breath, obsessed mode, and therefore was frozen in my seat untangling two different ends of yarn, and trying to do so without taking apart the work I had already done on the scarf.

Jelani finally took it from me part way through Private Practice, so around 10:30 pm (yes, I keep track of time with my evening shows), and he was able to, by the grace of God, unravel the back half and get it balled up. So at around 11:30, I was left with a ball of yarn at one end, a quarter of a scarf at the other end, and a lap-full of knots in the middle. around midnight, Jelani insisted I go to bed. I refused. This knotted yarn represented all of my unfinished, scrapped projects, and every other knotted yarn that I eventually took the scissors to. I would not be defeated. He went to bed, and I persisted on, moving my ball through each knot. With every movement I thought for sure I'd reached the point where I could just pull and it would unravel, but instead, I found the knots getting smaller and smaller, and more difficult to move my ball through.

By 1:00 am my butt was numb, and when I realized my feet hurt, I looked down to find that all my toes were swollen. I've officially turned into a little old lady who needs to get up and walk around every 30 minutes to keep the blood flowing. But I still didn't move.

1:33 am was the time of victory!

I had sat through half of the evening news, reruns of The Simpsons, Seinfeld, How I Met Your Mother, and Friends, and half of the second airing of Conan, and I finally had a beautiful ball of yarn with a string attached to my quarter scarf; no knots!

I wobbled to bed on my ballooned feet, got a whopping 6 hours of sleep, got my chores done this morning, and sat down to tell the world of my victory, when Elijah came to me with his Play-Dough; "Mommy, will you make me a ball?"

Too exhausted to do anything but sit and stitch, and with yarn-burn on my fingers (smaller, more paper-cut-esque rope burn), I cannot bring myself to touch the Play-Dough. I reluctantly concede defeat.

Nasty Knotted Yarn: 1                         Exhausted Yarn-Burned Mommy: 0

Well, played, yarn, well played.