Melts in your mouth

The lingering effects of festival fatigue carried over. For most of today I've felt like a train ran over me, so I'll have to postpone stories from the last four days in Cleveland. I just don't have the energy to put them all down at the moment.

But maybe there's time enough for one brief one... Kristin also attended the festival, and during one of our knitting sessions between films, she taught me a trick that's pretty cool. I'm guessing the more experienced knitters out there, which is basically every single one of you, already know this secret, but it was new to me.

I was making excellent progress on my felted needle holder when the time came to stop because the rush was on to get to the next film. I finished the row, pulled out the scissors, and cut the yarn since I was at the end of this part of the pattern. Except I wasn't. I had one more row to do. Let's not blame the martinis at the festival happy hour party for the mistake. This was purely a matter of getting in a hurry and doing something dumb.

It was another sort of whistle-wetting, of course, that provided the solution. That's right, Kristin taught me how to spit splice. She unraveled the strands and explained what I needed to do. Rather than spit in my hand (in the middle of a mall, no less), I elected to put the two intertwined ends in my mouth to felt them. That's much less conspicuous. I rubbed the dampened yarn between my hands. Like magic the severed ends were reconnected.

How cool is that?!

I came upon a bad spot in the yarn while knitting the holder's tie tonight, so I had to put more wool in my mouth to join it where I had severed it to remove the offending portion. It worked like a charm.

The things I've learned...