Transition

The past few weeks have been a time of transition. The desert is slowly unfolding from the dark coziness of winter. Days are righter earlier (although still not at my bus stop, the morning chill has less of a bite, and the flowers are still in full force (pictured above, my beloved Desert Bells). Blazing, unremitting sun and soul-crushing heat will come soon, but for now everything is so pretty and fresh we can pretend that leaving behind winter is a good thing.

At the same time, I have transitioned from my old job & volunteering at the University for a new internship, which means a new schedule, new bus, and new work. It promises to be quite an interesting time.

If only the same could be said for my knitting. I am down to the last...few...rows..of my Icarus, and it simply will not end. There was rawther an ugly scenario involving a third knot that, in a fit of pique, I snapped right out of the skein. It involved a lot of yarn, too. As we were untangling the first knot, Querido asked how one reattaches yarn. In a desperate attempt to make my knitting seem remotely interesting, I will present it here.

* Like casting on, binding off, and holding one's yarn, this is one of those things that everybody does differently. For lace in particular, where the fabric is delicate and you don't want any nasty lumpy areas, there are enough different techniques for rejoining yarn to fill an encyclopœdia. This shawl is for me, however, and I am entirely out of patience with it, so I rejoined the yarn the way I always rejoin yarn, which a statistically significant portion of the knitting population will undoubtedly feel is wrong on so many levels. All of them can go read Knitting without Tears and see what EZ has to say about "right ways" of knitting.

Ahem. Rejoining yarn:



Start with the ends (ends, not end, because I'm working with two strands of yarn at the same time) in a place away from lots of holes so you don't have to worry about the ends working loose, coming to a hole, and unraveling. I have one strand attached to the skein and one not, so I need to reattach just one of them. I place the new strand next to the old ones (one unbroken, one broken), smush them all together so they're like a single strand, and knit for an inch (or until I'm in danger of running into another section of holes).



Then, I drop the endy bit of the broken strand, and I'm left with just two strands again, which is how it should be. In this picture, you can see (right to left) the tail of yarn where I started the new strand, the tail of yarn where I dropped the broken strand, and the two strands, both connected with the skein of yarn, which I will continue working with.



Now push those tails out of the way, pick up the two strands attached to the skein, and keep working as if nothing happened. Which it did, and you will be reminded of as you knit past the place where you rejoined the yarn, at which points you will think uncharitable thoughts about Merino laceweight. You can also think uncharitable thoughts about Merino laceweight as you weave in these ends later, but that step belongs to a tutorial on weaving in ends.

And that, Querido, is how to rejoin yarn.