Horror of Horrors

I woke up this morning to get ARM off to school and found this







and discovered this. This nearly gave me a heart attack. After I
settled down I convinced myself that I had to repair the hole as quickly as possible. The reason it took convincing is because it would require me using the Kitchener Stitch to graft the two edges together, and I tend to regard grafting with the same enthusiasm as I regard going to the dentist. Fortunately I had some yarn that was the same color and about the same thickness, though not merino, so it would feel a little different. I started off by picking out even more stitches on one side of the hole, to get a tail long enough to do a spit-splice with. A spit-splice is when you join the ends of two separate pieces of yarn into a single piece, by felting them together with your hands. This only works with wool or other animal derived yarn. You get both ends wet (spit works, so does water, don't worry Mom, I used water) wrap them around each other, and then rub them between the palms of your hands as fast as possible until they don't come apart when you pull. I did this to keep the back of my shawl as neat as possible, so I would only have one end to weave in instead of two or more. Then I began to resew the hole together using the Kitchener stitch. It's not so hard really, it's just I have a block about the thing from doing it off of needles, which is a little harder. It turned out that, adding insult to misery, this had occurred on an increase row, and I had to figure out where the Yarn-overs had been, and stitch them in as well. Fun, fun.




I finally finished and went into the existing stitch for at least an inch, in order to catch the other end, then wove in the end and broke it off. And Voila! no more hole!

I blame the cats for this, more specifically Sethos, who both loves wool, and eats string and yarn. All it would take would be for one end to break while he was kneeding on my shawl, and he would start pulling on it till the other end broke. Grrrr.