Yesterday I wanted to work on my beaded shawl, but a certain feline friend lost* one of the the rubber stoppers to my bead needle and nearly spilled a canister of beads everywhere the day before in leaping onto my desk. As I scrambled to rescue the beads, she starting chewing on the yarn and pawing the project bag and somewhere in the fuss the stopper fell off the desk. This lead me to the decision that this particular project should continue to be a knit group one until the beaded edge is done.
Anyway, I had a 2.5hr company wide online presentation to watch and since I pay better attention with a project in my hands (reducing the itch to check email or read other items), I figured I’d work some more on the never ending plying. Since it was never ending, I was sure this would keep me engaged for the full duration of the meeting.
Imagine my shock when about 15min in, I had this in front of me:
I really almost couldn’t believe it – I’d run out of yarn to ply! I never thought the day would come and here, suddenly before my eyes, it was done.
Well, except I needed to get it off of the spindle. Because the spindle was so full and the yarn wasn’t sliding off easily, the early stages were a bit slow going as I unwound it. If you aren’t a spinner, it’s important to understand that you must rotate the spindle to unwind it from the side – like toilet paper or paper towels off a roll. You cannot hold the spindle still and pull it off the top or you are undoing the twist you worked hard to put into it.
So about 30min later, I was still here:
The helpful participation of kitty did not speed up this process, as you may well imagine.
But eventually I got there, and now i have this:
I still need to finish it with a nice soak and hang it to dry, but this means I’m effectively more than half way to having the yarn for TheEnabler’s brioche scarf. I say more than half way, because I have started spinning the red fiber to go with it already. Another year… and maybe I’ll be knitting.
Or maybe I’ll start knitting as soon as i have the first finished skein of red.
And you know what else this means? It means this weekend I can start winding the yarn into cakes for the Fireworks Festival brioche shawl for myself. And January isn’t even finished yet…
*She appears to have magicked it away since I have carefully scanned the entire office floor and examined each small dust bunny I found for the small 1/4in piece of black rubber with a tiny hole in the middle. It is gone and I’m going to have to come up with another solution or stick to just loading the beads I can use in one session on the needle. I am also cursing the bead needle manufacturer for not anticipating this and supplying an extra stopper with the needle.