What A Week | The Twisted Yarn

There are weeks that pass by quietly, each day unremarkable, blending into the next like the neutral background of a well-planned colorwork project. And then there are the other kind of weeks — the ones that twist and tangle and surprise you at every turn, the ones that leave you sitting at the end of Friday evening with a cup of something warm, staring at the wall, thinking: what on earth just happened?

This was one of those weeks.

For those of you who are new here, welcome to The Twisted Yarn, a space where we talk honestly about the craft of knitting and crocheting — the wins, the disasters, the late-night frogging sessions, and the occasional project that turns out so much better than expected that you have to take a photo in natural light and show absolutely everyone you know. If you’ve been around for a while, you already know that “twisted yarn” is both a nod to the technique and a pretty accurate description of how things tend to go in a crafter’s life. Nothing is ever quite as straight as it looks on the skein.

So let’s get into it. Here is a full, honest, no-holds-barred account of what has been, in every possible sense, quite a week.

Monday: The Pattern That Refused to Make Sense

It started, as so many knitting disasters do, with absolute optimism.

I had been eyeing a lace shawl pattern for the better part of three months. It had been sitting in my queue on Ravelry, tagged, hearted, downloaded, and printed onto paper that immediately got buried under two other projects and a ball of sock yarn that escaped its bag. But Monday morning arrived with a rare combination of good light, free time, and that specific restless energy that means only one thing: cast on something new.

The pattern was written by an indie designer I admire enormously. Her work is always precise, her stitch counts immaculate, her written instructions the kind that read almost like poetry — clear, rhythmic, satisfying. So I had no reason to expect trouble.

Reader, the trouble was immediate.

Row three introduced a “nupp,” which, if you’re unfamiliar, is a small cluster of stitches worked together to create a bobble-like texture popular in Estonian lace. I have done nupps before. I know what nupps are. I respect nupps the way you respect a large, territorial dog: carefully and from a reasonable distance.

But this pattern’s nupp was different. It called for working nine stitches into one stitch — not seven, the more common number, but nine — and then working all nine stitches together on the return row. I read it twice. I read it three times. I consulted the pattern notes. I looked at the sample photograph. I turned the page upside down, which helped nothing, but felt necessary at the time.

After an hour and a half of attempting, failing, pulling out, and re-attempting, I finally got it. Not perfectly, not elegantly, but I got it. The row was done. The stitch count held. I put the knitting down, made a cup of tea, and sat with the quiet satisfaction of someone who has won a very small but very personal battle.

Monday, despite everything, was a win.

Tuesday: Yarn Delivery Day (and Its Consequences)

Tuesday brought a package.

This should not have been a surprise. I may have placed a small order a couple of weeks ago during a sale at a dyer I love. And by “small order” I mean I bought four skeins when I had told myself firmly and aloud, while making eye contact with no one, that I would buy no more than two.

Here is the thing about hand-dyed yarn that I think no one adequately warns beginners about: it is not just a crafting material. It is an experience. When a skein arrives in a color you have been thinking about for weeks — in a fiber blend you know will feel extraordinary against your fingers — something happens in your brain that is frankly difficult to explain to anyone outside the yarn community and completely understandable to everyone inside it.

The four skeins that arrived were: a fingering weight in a deep, inky teal with flashes of forest green (earmarked immediately for a sock pattern I’ve been saving), a DK weight in a warm terracotta with just enough variation in the dye to give it life, a laceweight in a soft grey-blue that reminded me immediately of early morning fog over water, and — this was the unplanned fourth skein, the impulse, the problem — a bulky single-ply in a rich, warm burgundy that I have absolutely no current project for and cannot stop thinking about.

I spent most of Tuesday photographing the skeins in various lights, browsing patterns that might work with each one, and carefully adding everything to my stash records before placing it all in the basket where yarn lives when it has not yet been assigned a purpose. The basket is quite full. This is a known issue.

Wednesday: The Great Frog

Every crafter has a moment they knew was coming and kept pretending wasn’t.

Mine arrived on Wednesday afternoon, with a sock I had been working on for approximately six weeks.

The sock was fine. That was the problem. It was perfectly fine — the yarn was nice, the pattern was competent, the construction was sound. But I had known since roughly week three that the leg was too long for my foot. I measured it. I held it up and looked at it. I thought about what it would mean to continue. I knitted two more inches anyway, the way you do when you are not quite ready to admit something to yourself.

Wednesday, I admitted it.

I frogged the sock. For the uninitiated, frogging means pulling out your knitting — the name comes from “rip it, rip it,” which sounds a great deal like the sound a frog makes, and which is the kind of terrible pun that only knitters find funny but which we find extremely funny. I frogged six weeks of sock. I wound the yarn back into a ball. I swatched — yes, actually swatched, like a responsible adult — for a different pattern. I cast on fresh.

The new sock, by Wednesday evening, already looked more right than the old one had in six weeks. This is the thing about frogging that is very hard to explain to non-crafters: it feels like loss, but it is actually a correction. The yarn is still there. The time is not wasted. What you’ve gained is knowledge, and what you’ve eliminated is a sock that would have lived in a drawer because wearing it felt slightly wrong in a way you could never fully articulate.

The frog is an act of optimism. I believe this completely.

Thursday: Down the Technique Rabbit Hole

If you use the internet for craft research — and you do, we all do — you are familiar with what I will call the Three-Hour Tutorial Problem.

It goes like this: you look up one specific thing. Perhaps you want to understand a particular increase, or you want to see someone demonstrate a cast-on method you’ve never tried. You find a video. The video is helpful. At the end of the video there is a recommendation for a related video, which is also helpful, and which mentions a technique you hadn’t considered, which leads you to a tutorial on that technique, which introduces a topic you haven’t thought about since you first learned to knit and perhaps didn’t fully understand then, and before you have registered the passage of time it is dark outside and you have watched eleven videos and your tea has gone cold and you have written six things in your craft notebook under the heading “to try” without completing the original task that sent you to the internet in the first place.

This was Thursday.

I went in looking for a refresher on short-row heel construction for the new sock. I came out the other side with a notebook full of notes on Japanese short rows, shadow wraps, and the history of heel construction across different knitting traditions around the world, plus three new patterns downloaded, two new designers added to my “follow” list, and the deep, satisfied feeling of someone who has learned a great deal without technically finishing anything.

The sock heel is still not done. But I know more about heels than I have ever known in my life. I am choosing to count this as productive.

Friday: Community, and Why It Matters

Here is where the week turned genuinely lovely.

Friday morning I joined a virtual knit-along that a friend had been nudging me toward for months. I had been resistant in the way you sometimes are when something sounds wonderful but requires you to actually show up somewhere, even virtually, even from your sofa. But I joined. And within about twenty minutes I remembered, with real feeling, why the fiber arts community is one of the most quietly remarkable things I have ever been part of.

There were people knitting from several different countries. There was a woman who had been knitting for sixty years and was working on a stranded colorwork yoke sweater in colors so beautiful I actually gasped a little and had to explain to my cat what had happened. There was a newer crafter, maybe six months into knitting, who had just successfully turned their first heel and was showing it to the camera with an expression of pure, uncomplicated triumph that I recognized instantly from my own early knitting days.

We talked about the patterns we were working on. We talked about yarn we had loved and yarn that had disappointed us. Someone mentioned a new spinning technique they’d been exploring. Someone else brought up a knitting-related book they’d been reading. At one point we all went quiet for about ten minutes and simply knitted together, the soft background noise of multiple lives happening at once — the clink of a coffee cup, someone’s dog, the distant sound of rain — and it was comfortable in a way that felt important.

There’s something the fiber arts community has always understood that feels increasingly necessary in a world that moves very fast and rewards very little stillness: the act of making something by hand, slowly, stitch by stitch, is not a productivity strategy. It is not a wellness hack. It is not an aesthetic. It is a way of being present in your own life, of marking the passage of time with something you created, of participating in a tradition that stretches back thousands of years and will, with any luck, continue for thousands more.

Sitting with that group on Friday morning, all of us making things, all of us choosing to spend an hour doing something that required our hands and our attention and our patience, I felt the particular kind of contentment that only craft seems to reliably produce. The world outside was complicated. The week had been a tangle. But the yarn did what yarn does when you treat it well: it came together, row by row, into something that was starting, slowly, to look like what it was meant to be.

Saturday and Sunday: The Wind-Down

The weekend was for finishing and planning.

Saturday I blocked the first completed section of the lace shawl from Monday. If you’ve never blocked lace, it is one of the more dramatic transformations in all of knitting — you take what looks like a crumpled, slightly disheveled heap of fabric and you wet it, stretch it over blocking mats, pin it, and walk away. You come back hours later to something completely different: open, airy, the stitch pattern finally visible and coherent, the whole thing somehow three times the size it appeared before. It is magic. I say this having done it many times. It remains magic.

Sunday was for planning the week ahead, which in this house means sitting with a cup of coffee and looking through patterns, thinking about which projects are at which stages, deciding what to carry with me if I’m going to be out, and doing the gentle mental arithmetic of fiber content and needle size and time available that experienced crafters learn to do almost instinctively.

I looked at the burgundy bulky yarn from Tuesday’s delivery. I looked at it for a long time. I pulled up Ravelry, browsed for bulky patterns, and found a hat — simple, elegant, with a small cable detail running up the crown — that felt exactly right. I bookmarked it. I didn’t cast on. But I thought about it warmly for the rest of the afternoon, the way you think about a letter you’re about to write or a conversation you’re looking forward to having. The anticipation of a project is its own particular pleasure.

A Few Things I Want to Remember From This Week

Not because every week needs a tidy conclusion, but because some weeks teach you things if you pay attention:

The nupp on row three will almost always be harder than you expect. Do it anyway. The lace opens up eventually.

Frogging is not failure. Frogging is editing. Every good thing gets edited.

Three-hour tutorial sessions are not wasted time, even when they look unproductive from the outside. You are building vocabulary. You are expanding what you know how to see.

The yarn community — whether in person at a local yarn shop, online in forums and social spaces, in a virtual knit-along on a Friday morning — is worth showing up for. Even when it requires you to leave the house. Even when it requires you to leave the sofa. Even when it requires you to put on a presentable top for a video call while wearing pajama bottoms because you’re crafting and the camera doesn’t go that far down.

And finally: the basket of unloved yarn, the growing queue, the pile of patterns that outnumbers your ability to knit them in this lifetime — none of this is a problem. It is a library. It is proof that you are someone with enough curiosity and love of making to always want to try the next thing. That is not a character flaw. That is a creative life.

Here’s to the next week. Whatever it brings — whether a smooth and satisfying project that goes exactly to plan, or a tangled, surprising, frog-and-restart kind of week — it will be worth writing about.

It always is.

If you’re new to The Twisted Yarn, feel free to explore the archive and find the posts that call to you. If you’re a longtime reader, thank you for showing up week after week. This little corner of the internet exists because of you.