{"id":192,"date":"2010-02-07T15:05:40","date_gmt":"2010-02-07T23:05:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gknerd.com\/?p=192"},"modified":"2010-02-07T15:05:40","modified_gmt":"2010-02-07T23:05:40","slug":"the-hat-that-was-lost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gknerd.com\/?p=192","title":{"rendered":"The Hat That Was Lost"},"content":{"rendered":"

Remember how Monkey Kitty has an extreme fondness for all things yarn and wool related?\u00a0 Well, I wasn’t telling the whole story in the last post<\/a> when I told you about how I’d thwarted his attempts to destroy the knitting.<\/p>\n

See, I apparently didn’t learn my lesson about leaving hats hanging out around the house, and that night while we were sleeping, Monkey Kitty stole into our room, jumped up on the dresser, and stole another hat!\u00a0 Since he was stealthy enough not to wake us, no one stopped him from actually damaging the hat, so what I woke up to that morning was this:<\/p>\n

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Now, really, that doesn’t seem so bad, actually…until you get up close with the damage, at which point this:<\/p>\n

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And this:<\/p>\n

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Plus a couple other loose ends convinced me that the hat was too far gone to be saved.\u00a0 Luckily, this wasn’t a hand made hat and didn’t carry much sentimental value, so after a few minutes of cursing myself for leaving it out and Monkey Kitty for taking advantage of the situation, I moved on to thinking, “Well, what can I do with this now?”<\/p>\n

And then I thought, “You know, I could<\/em> take it apart and salvage the yarn for another project…”\u00a0 (We’ll forget, for a minute, that the yarn for the hat is pure polyester and thus relatively unlikely to ever be knit by me.)<\/p>\n

After a couple stitches had been unraveled, I got a clue that maybe this would be a messier process than I had signed up for:<\/p>\n

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It turns out that chenille sheds.\u00a0 Massively sheds.\u00a0 Especially when you’re pulling the length of it through the stitches to get to a point where you can just start unraveling.<\/p>\n

After about a dozen stitches, something else occurred to me.\u00a0 Something I’d read about on the Yarn Harlot’<\/a>s blog just a few months ago.\u00a0 Something about, er…unraveling ribbing<\/a>?<\/p>\n

Yep, that’s right – ribbing can only be unraveled in one direction (took me about 3 days to accept it, so if you haven’t had the revelation – or the failed experience – give it a minute to sink in).\u00a0 Which meant that while one side of the hole I was making was perfectly fine for unraveling:<\/p>\n

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The other side was having, er, difficulties:<\/p>\n

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Sighing, I decided to deal with that problem later, and soldiered on working the hole bigger until it reached all the way around the hat:<\/p>\n

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And after that, it was pure, unraveling goodness.\u00a0 Am I the only one who gets a perverse pleasure out of frogging knitting?\u00a0 Especially store-bought knitting – there’s something so powerful in the idea that you can take this thing and reduce it down to component parts which you can then use to make something else.<\/p>\n

Or maybe that’s just me.\u00a0 That’s cool, I’m used to being…special.<\/p>\n

When everything was said and done (and after doing the same hole making\/enlarging process on the other side of the non-ravelable half), I ended up with a huge pile of unusable “stuff” and a few balls of yarn:<\/p>\n

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Anyone want some polyester chenille yarn?\u00a0 I think I’ve gotten all the pleasure I need out of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Remember how Monkey Kitty has an extreme fondness for all things yarn and wool related?\u00a0 Well, I wasn’t telling the whole story in the last post when I told you about how I’d thwarted his attempts to destroy the knitting. See, I apparently didn’t learn my lesson about leaving hats hanging out around the house, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[26,28],"class_list":["post-192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-knitting-surgery","tag-monkey-kitty"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gknerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gknerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gknerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gknerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gknerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=192"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.gknerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gknerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gknerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gknerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}