Tuesday, June 30, 2009

The Pain in Frogging

I am still working on the log cabin blanket. As a matter of fact, I might have gone cross-eyed from looking at this damn thing. It's not really the blanket's fault, it's not the miles and miles and miles of boring garter stitch either. I'm putting all the blame on the yarn.

The Debbie Mumm Traditions yarn is a deliciously soft and gloriously colored corespun yarn. It's 70% acrylic and 30% wool. There. Now I've told you the good stuff, now for the bad. It's a corespun yarn. It's 70% acrylic and 30% wool. There, that was also the bad stuff.

It's splitty as hell and bunches up viciously. That's not so bad while you're knitting it up if you hold it loosely. The problem comes when, not if, you need to frog it. The soft yarn grips to itself like there's no tomorrow.

Remember these? These were a tank that for some God forsaken reason I thought this yarn would be good for:


I am in the process of frogging them. The bottom one took me four hours to frog. Yes, that's right, four friggin' hours of fighting with grabby yarn mixed with short rows. It wasn't fun. Needful, but not fun.

So after the frogging I have a bazillion small balls of yarn. Look how many ends have to be woven when you use a lot of these small balls of yarn in just a couple of squares:


Yeah. More not fun.

But, look how beautiful these are from the front:


I don't know how much more yarn I'll need and have no clue how much I'll get from frogging the other piece. I may need to try and order more since my JoAnn's didn't have any of this color left. They had two other colorways that could be fun to mix with this one, but I'm not sure if I'll do that or not.

All I know is that I just have to make triple sure any of the squares don't need frogging again, cause if it comes to that, I'll be putting the whole kit and caboodle in the trash.