Come undone

I wrote yesterday that the Asherton Reversible Scarf had managed to remain error-free. Bzzt! What I failed to observe at the coffee shop was that five stitches in the last row I worked on were purled when they should have been knitted. I did ten more rows before spotting a splotch of garter stitch ruining the pattern.

Even if I weren't making the scarf for charity, this was a glaring mistake I would have to fix. I saved the repair work for this morning. It was slow going, so I put it down for more immediate frogging satisfaction. Yes, after a delay of more than two months, I ripped out the sock in variegated green yarn with too many cast on stitches.

What I didn't think about was the mess of unraveled yarn pooling on the floor. Might this come back to bite me? You bet. I picked up the pile and began winding it into a ball. But oh, the knots! I picked and pulled at them. I took what remained in the skein and unraveled it on the floor, turning my living room and dining area into a surface for an extremely long and winding river of fiber. Having devoted at least an hour to this task, I accepted that a couple judicious snips of the scissors would take care of the problem without losing too much yarn. For Pete's sake, I have another skein of the stuff. Determination can be a drawback.

When ripping out a lot, is there a good way to keep the yarn from tangling? I know that I'll have to do massive frogging sooner or later and would prefer not to deal with this secondary headache again if possible.

In the afternoon I undid the seven other rows necessary to get to the root of the problem. Five wrong stitches meant undoing 440. A stitch in time saves nine., so the saying goes. I suppose that rolls off the tongue better than a stitch in time saves eighty-eight.

Lately I've noticed a slight uptick in my site traffic via search engines. Lurkers new and old are welcome to make themselves known in the comments. Those same stats also show a couple visitors via a Ravelry discussion topic. Knowing that I've come up in discussion somehow, no matter how insignificant, and not being able to check it is maddening. As if having 11,000-plus people ahead of me in line for Ravelry isn't enough.

The good news is that it sounds like the day is near when the doors will be thrown open to the thousands of us on the waiting list. Donna gave me a peek at the site when I visited her, but this video tour really has me eager to join all the cool kids.