New Life Purpose

Let me make one thing perfectly clear:

I love Lorna's Laces.

I love the colors. I love the way it feels when I knit with it. I love the way it looks when it is transformed into a finished garment. I love how that finished garment feels. Love the Laces. No question about it.

That said, I am going to make it my mission in life to find the person at the LL factory or workshop who is responsible for taking up most of my day. I will find the individual who who was asleep at the switch for that one brief second. I will hunt this nefarious stealer of precious time until my end of days. Mark my words, dear readers. I will find the person who is responsible for this:

Skein Winding 101 is not required reading for all Yarn Factory employees.

And when, at the end of this long and arduous search, I find that soulless person who made my day so "challenging," I'll....well, I'm gonna.....Oh, I'll probably just burst into tears and babble incoherently while waving a yarn clot in his or her face. The whole thing will probably degenerate into some sort of Caring Circle with me getting comforting hugs from all the yarn makers.

I talk big. But I'm really rather wimpy.

Now, I take some responsibility here. I had a bad feeling when I popped this skein on the swift. There were errant strands that didn't seem to want to follow the group. Rebel yarn, if you will. I diligently located these wayward wanderers and attempted to get them back in line. I carefully examined the placement...and I will admit to having an sense of foreboding overtake me. But, I couldn't really see where I had gone awry in trying to make sense of this poorly packaged yarn. I took a chance. I began to crank the ball-winder. How bad could it possibly be?

Needless to say, it could be pretty bad. There was a great explosion of lovely sock yarn, a rather ominous clunk from the ball-winder and several exclamations from The Sheep that do not bear repeating. What you see in the picture above is the carnage.

I began to rewind the yarn. Painstakingly. Slowly. With gritted teeth...

And I have still not managed to unsnarl this ungodly mess. I'm, perhaps, half-way through it. I let it go after two hours. It needed a little time to think about its behavior, frankly. And, since my eyes were already crossed from following the path of a single strand of yarn through a plethora of twists, knots and swirls, it only made sense to just play computer games for the afternoon.

I sort of lost track of time for a while there...I don't exactly know how long I was playing. But there seems to be something of a gap in my day between the hours of 2:30 and 6:00. (that was when I got hungry...) Odds are good that this pile of unrealized Monkey Socks will continue to sit for the remainder of the evening. I am holding out hopes that a band of merry fiber elves will sneak in during the night and untangle it for me. I've heard tell of such creatures. I'm leaving out some cookies and milk in the hopes of luring them in to turn what looks like blue intestines back into the lovely Lorna's Laces with which I so optimistically began this day.

It could happen...

Meanwhile, in happier news: I will be announcing the winners of my Relay For Life Sponsorship Contest on Saturday. I have used the random number generator to make the oh-so-difficult decisions regarding prize distribution for me. I will just let you all sit in suspense while I locate blog urls and the like. We here at Sheepie's House Of Relays And Yarn Mishaps like to do things by the book, after all. I am rather giddy at the prospect of giving away such fabulous prizes...

And I promise that no one will be getting a box full of mis-skeined and exploded yarn. I'm not even tempted. At all. Not one little bit....

SA