Sunday, March 15, 2009

Lace crisis - averted!

I wanted to add the resolution ight up there in the post title - to assure all readers (particularly those lace knitting readers) that the crisis has been averted, lest the smelling salts or difibrillator need to be summoned!

The tale begins on one of the many flights we took over the last week - I believe we were flying up to work again, back in WA. I was happily knitting awayon the leafy lace creation for Bink's fast-approaching wedding, feeling relieved to finally be making some headway. I seem to be coming across errors I've made so often in this knit; one stitch too few, one stitch extra, so it had felt like I spent most of my time tinking back to see where I'd gone wrong! But I was finally on smooth sailing, merrily knitting away with such smooth and glossy magical yarn.
Bon's lace March 09 (2)
But - gah! The yarn would keep getting caught up from the centre pull ball! Being a 2 ply yarn, I've wound the yarn from he cone into a centre pull yarn cake and am knitting double stranded using one strand form the outside of the cake and one from the centre. Generally this is fine, but with reasonable frequency the centre pull resists then pops out with a gret clump of yarn, rather then a fine issue of one strand.
Bon's lace March 09 (3)
This was one such incident. Normally the little clump untangles very easily as it is all yarn still nicely wound but just a little to eager to burst forth and be knit. This clump however, had mischeif on its mind. It resisted and resisted and became... a KNOT. Prevously with these 'knots' I'd been able to pull gentley and the knot would come undone - not really a true knot, but more like a slip knot. Not this time.. I pulled and instead of the satisfying 'ping' of the knot coming free, I saw this;
snapped yarn! Bon's lace march 09 (2)
broken yarn! On lace!

The yarn is Jaggerspun Zephyr - a combination of merino and tussah silk (diviiine!) so I wasn't sure if it would felt enough to be spliced back together. But in situations like these you jump in like a gallant Indiana Jones to save the day, you don't stop to consider fibre compatibility.
Spit splice
Thankfully it worked and the silk grabbed hold of the wool as it felted and all is happy - relief! Looking at the two strands the spit-spliced yarn is noticabley darker and thicker, but can't be spotted now it's all knitted up. I'm just hoping it holds up when I get to blocking!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Phew :)

Amanda said...

I'm still shaking, phew!

Ann said...

Thank goodness the yarn felts. It happened to me when I was knitting with silk & I had to sew in the ends. Try putting stitch markers in each pattern repeat so that you can easily count the stitches after knitting each repeat. Good luck.