The Adventure of the Tangled Yarn

You guys.

I just spent an hour and a half untangling yarn.

An hour and a half.

In case you wanted to know, that's about the amount of time it took to listen to a lecture about bonobo sex (among other things) with a couple of Beatles songs tossed in at the end.

Well, ok. I didn't start out intending to spend an hour and a half fighting with a tangled, knotty fiend from hell. It all started out because I wanted to listen to a series of lectures entitled "Global Problems of Population Growth" (if you're interested, you can find it here). I have a hard time just listening to lectures, especially if I'm not taking notes. I have occasionally been known to bring jars of Play-Doh to class with me, to the amusement (and sometimes resentment) of my peers. So I decided that today would be the day to learn to crochet!

After pestering my brother for clues as to where I might find his crocheting materials, I finally unearthed some yarn and a needle from a pot next to the fireplace (what?). A few Google searches later, and I was ready to go!

At first, I actually felt as if I was doing quite well. I taught myself to tie a slip knot, and moved onto the chain stitch. According to the pattern, I was supposed to crochet 224 stitches, and then turn around and come back for step two. I made it to what seemed like 224, and then prepared to turn around and come back. That's where I ran into problems.

You see, I made it through step one mostly by admiring the pretty pictures and imitating what they had done. Step two told me to run the hook through both loops for the second row, but there were no pictures. No pictures at all. I assume they figured that if you can make it this far, you must clearly be a competent crocheter, and therefore no longer need pictures. I felt like a child who has been told that they could no longer read picture books, and must instead move onto chapter books. In other words, I was a little bitter...but mostly just lost and confused. All of a sudden, the innocent chain I had been holding turned into a snarling, writhing mass of loops that refused to behave or at least give me a clue as to which loops I was supposed to be mauling. I struggled along for a while, and then decided for whatever reason that this would probably be a lot easier to figure out if the yarn was thicker. Please do not ask me why I thought this.

The thing about the thicker yarn was, there was half of a hat attached to the end of it, from the days when my brother was into crocheting. Well, he wasn't going to finish it, and I decided that I needed the yarn more than he needed the half hat, so I started unravelling. And the hat continued to unravel. And unravel. Soon I had a mountain of yarn sitting next to me.

I began to dig through the pile in search of the end, which I had inconveniently misplaced as soon as I had finished unravelling the half hat. Unfortunately, this just served to tangle the mess of yarn even further. By the time I found the end, the yarn was so hopelessly tangled that I couldn't hope to do anything with it. I decided to try to roll it up to make things easier, dropping the end again in the process. I reached a knot less than a minute into my yarn rolling process, and upon failing to untangle it (and probably making the whole thing even worse) I decided I would just start from the beginning and untangle the whole thing. This, of course, meant finding the end yet again. I eventually did manage to find it again, and overall the whole process, aside from being excessively lengthy, was rather what you would expect -- a lot of trial and error, a lot of swearing. But at long last, here I am, one lecture and a few Beatles songs later, with a lovely little ball of yarn sitting next to me on the couch.

The fucker.