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Winding yarn is, I am discovering, an extremely tedious task; especially when the yarn comes in a huge skein and manages to get more than a little bit tangled between when it was purchased and when it comes time to convert it into a nice, neat ball. Friday night I zipped off to craft night with my tote bag stuffed with all the completed pieces of my sweater so far, fully intending to work on sewing those pieces together, and maybe even doing a little work on the sleeves. Instead I sat at the table and wound yarn; or rather, I sat at the table and spent short bursts of time winding yarn in between longer periods of time spent untangling it.
My knitting-enabling friend very nicely let me take her winding contraption home with me. It’s really nothing more than a little thing which clips to the edge of a table and has four extendable arms around which you can drape the skein, but it’s much more convenient than either making someone sit there with their arms outstretched holding the skein for an hour or two on end, or else trying to do it from an untidy heap on your lap. So since I had it with me, I was stupid and ended up staying awake until nearly 2am yesterday morning finishing up the first skein and getting hopelessly entabled in the second.
She also let me borrow a few more books, including one that is chock full of patterns for Aran-style knitting, which is the type where the pattern is in the texture and is not done with more than one color. In between snarling at the tangled mess that is my newly acquired stash of pretty, pretty yarn, I flipped through the pages and oohed and aahed and ignored that little voice in my head that insisted that I really do not want to dive into another project requiring complicated cabling, really I don’t. I am sure I will most likely regret it when I start the next sweater and am faced with far more complicated instructions than ‘knit 2, purl 4, knit 2’ and so on, but hey, at least it will be pretty. Assuming, of course, that I can untangle all my yarn enough to actually *knit* with it. ******** It has been a truly lovely weekend, even with the frustration of winding yarn that refuses to untangle. The weather decided to finally stop with the grey and gloomy and sprung a bit of early spring on us, to the point that yesterday and today it was warm enough to open the windows and let in the sun, and this afternoon we even broke down and put on shorts. The cats have been quite happy to have open windows again, taking no time at all to crowd onto the sills, noses pressed to the screens and whiskers twitching wildly with the excitement of all the new smells. Plus, with all the new plants in the backyard there are new things to watch and smell – including all the birds who have been delighted at the fact that our small spate of gardening Thursday night uncovered all manner of bugs and worms to eat.
I’d fully intended to try to get a bike ride in yesterday afternoon but instead ended up coming home from getting our taxes done (we’re getting a refund – phew!) and curled up in bed with an ice pack and large quantities of ibuprofin until my head decided that it would give up and make the migraine go away. So this afternoon, since Richard had a meeting after church and wasn’t going to be available anyway, I poked at my dad until he agreed to go riding with me (it didn’t take much poking). After lunch we each headed to our respective houses to change and then I rode over to meet him and we meandered around town for about five miles, with only one brief detour to check out the newest housing development being constructed on the other side of town. With those five miles plus the ride to and from my parents house, I managed to rack up another ten miles toward the 1000 mile goal - not as much as I might have liked to accomplish this weekend, but better than no miles at all.
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