The Forever Shrug

I recently took up a project to make a shrug for a wedding.

I also recently discovered how to create adult clothes on the fly.

For the back and the sleeves, I used a shell stitch, and for the front and the trim, just a single crochet stitch. Sound simple, right? Wrong.

This took me forever. Let me let you in on a little secret no one told me- a hank of yarn is a meltdown wound up into a neat little twist. Somehow, after all these years of crocheting, I failed to learn about hanks. I made this shrug with silk/bamboo yarn, and the place I ordered it from listed it as a skein. When it showed up in the mail, though, I quickly realized I had no idea what to do with it.

Occasionally, I buy this smoked cheese from the grocery store that's twisted into this braided coil thing, and to eat it, you untwist it and pull it apart. I applied this knowledge to the hanks of yarn, and quickly wound up with a giant knot of slippery yarn. I used six of these on the shrug, so you can imagine how much suffering there was.

For one, I had my husband hold the yarn, "Little House on the Prairie" style, by holding his hands out and me looping it over them, so I could then roll it into a ball. This did not work. I tried untwisting it and laying it carefully on the floor, then rolling up that way, but it kept getting caught on itself and my cat, Dexter, kept leaping into the middle of it gleefully.

Six horrible hanks of anger later, I did come up with something beautiful, and a lesson learned about the perils of yarn. So, take away this little nugget of knowledge- look up how to deal with a hank of yarn BEFORE you use it.

And make a shrug soon.