Oct 28th, 2023 Saturday Cloudy
I can be stupidly stubborn sometimes.
Last Sunday night, I felt a little tired to engage in other fun activities but did not feel like going to bed yet, so I took up the knitting project that I have been working on for a year. This is a long double-colored scarf for my husband. The pattern is not complicated, but it requires a lot of patience because my fingertips often start hurting after knitting for a while, up to two hours. With my rudimentary knitting skills, that means I can finish eight to ten rows at a time, at most. To make this scarf long enough (supposedly as long as the height of my husband), I expect 1100 to 1200 rows. In short, a long way to go.
In fact, I do not mind an extensive project like this. It gives me something to do with my hands while watching videos online, and creating something tangible offers a sense of satisfaction that my service-based day job where almost everything is on the computer does not provide.
As you can see from the picture, I have made quite a bit of progress, and the yarns were getting to the end. Just then, when I was sitting on the bed, half distracted by the anime on the screen, the blue yarn became entangled.
At first I paid no attention, thinking that it would sort out by itself as I continued to knit. But it did not. I reached the point that the yarn was tightly bound into a knot, and I could not knit further without facing this problem.
I have had similar experiences before, so I believe that good eyes and composure would eventually solve the issue. I took a deep breath, and began tackling it.
It turned out that this knot may be harder to deal with. Several times I felt that I disentangled one part of the yarn, only to find another part messed up. I tried a few methods, but I could not judge whether I even got farther.
My husband was grumpy since the light in the bedroom was bothering him, so I transferred to the living room. It was already 1 a.m.. Maybe it was the time of the night, I heard a voice in my head, “it would be much easier if you just cut the knotty part.”
I was afraid to do so, because it means I need to connect the yarn myself and there will be knots in the finished scarf. As a result, I carried on with my effort, hoping it would pay off. Only ten minutes more, I told myself.
Ten minutes turned into twenty, thirty…by 3 a.m., I was still staring at chaos.
Extremely frustrated, I pulled two ends of a knot in my two hands, and “snap”, it broke. With the breakage, the knot disentangled itself.
“Well, that was easy!” thought I. Now that the yarn was no longer intact, I figured that more breakage would not make much difference. I quickly went through the rest of the yarn, and within fifteen minutes, I got all of the yarn organized and neatly wound up around a book, so I do not have to waste time on unraveling it again, EVER.
From time to time, cutting loose all the complexities and starting over, barbaric as it seems, may be the most effective approach. All you need is the courage.