Havanna CAL Adventures

End of day 3.  
End of Row 9.

It was an adventurous day.

For as long as a project is at all portable I carry it about with me in bags hanging off my wrist or shoulder or strapped to me in some fashion.  I contribute to the care of my elderly mother and must respond to her beeps at a moments notice.  Twice today one of the skeins fell out as I left my chair and I traveled thru multiple rooms before noticing.  Down the hall and across the kitchen in the afternoon and down the hall, into the kitchen and back down the hall into Mom's room at her bedtime. 

The first time one of the cats discovered the yarn bonanza before I did and was pouncing on and trying to carry off wads of the loops that had come out of the center of the skein.  I was grabbing them from him and pulling up yards of the yarn and stuffing it willy-nilly into the three bags hanging off of me holster style as I followed the yarn back to the skein in the doorway of my craft room. 

It took me well over an hour to untangle the yarn from that skein, from the straps of the bags and from the yarn from the other four skeins still attached to the project--and from the project itself which was just a ribbon at 6 rows.

In the process I'd detached the skeins from all but the 5th and 6th rows to more easily untangle the yarn.  I keep them on with a stitch saver in the loop until I'm sure I'm not going to need to frog. I probably only need to keep on two besides the row I"m working but was so anxious to start new rows Ii'd been procrastinating.  Besides I have a thing with finishing.

Turns out my fear of finishing is at least somewhat well founded.  Or at least it just got a good jolt of reinforcement.  For as I was getting all set to get back to work on row 7 (on which I'd been 5 iterations in when the adventure began and which I'd frogged first thing to get that skein free of the melee) I discovered that the last stitch of row 2 was missing and the last stitch of row 3 was joined to the air.

After contemplating for several minutes I decided the best option was to remove the last few stitches of rows 3-6 and redo from row 2 up.  That took another hour and a quarter as it was quite tricky for the rows already cut off their skeins.  I managed it by going down a full mm in hook size and increasing tension until my left hand cramped and the yarn was half its diameter.  The difference in the fabric look and feel in that last square inch bugs me but not enough to frog the whole thing and start over.

As my Mom's mother use to say, "What you can't see from a galloping horse..."  Yes she said it just like that leaving it hanging but obviously meaning its not worth a fuss.