The Fiber Husband

Seven hundred and twenty yards of handspun bamboo sock yarn, dyed in cerulean, sapphire, plum and amethyst. Three sets of gorgeous KnitPicks double pointed aluminum knitting needles. One entire book on sock knitting. Weeks of preparation. All thwarted by the dryer and one load of laundry. Which all led to the discovery that my husband had become a Fiber Husband, as surely as I had become a Military Wife when he joined the Air Force.

It was an honest mistake – bamboo can be machine dried. Just not machine dried with a full load of laundry before being knit. I was partly testing to see how bamboo yarn holds up in the dryer, and partly just in a hurry to see the finished yarn, which turned out to be a gorgeous, shimmering, perfect sapphire and amethyst, sinfully soft rat’s nest. I about cried pulling it out of the dryer, the futility of untangling the two impossibly knotty masses washing over me. It was so beautiful, so soft, such brilliant jewel tones… but such a mess. I couldn’t even find where the yarn began… how was I supposed to untangle it? Yet, the sheer pointlessness of undoing the yarn didn’t deter me from trying. If I can shovel snow before it stops falling, I can do this.

So I spent the next 3 hours trying to untangle the sock yarn, snapping weak points on accident while undoing knots, pulling my hair out in frustration after hitting snarl, after snarl, after huge snarl. As a last resort to keep things relatively sane, I draped the skein around a partially extended plastic baby gate, and traced the yarn bits inch by inch, wrapping it around a spare bobbin as I go. By 10pm, my head is in my hands, my poor yarn-loving heart in pieces on the floor, and my lesson learned. I am about to give up and call it ruined, when my husband, who has spent the day untangling server cables at work from someone else’s mess, sits down next to me and picks up a loose end of yarn and begins his own inch-by-inch trace. I pick my strand back up.

Inch by inch, we worked our way around and around that baby gate. Except my dear husband, as sweet as he was in helping me untangle the terrible, horrible mess of yarn, is not a yarn person. He’s not a fiber person either. Nor can he tell the difference between amethyst and plum, or cerulean and sapphire. Hell, even I have problems with Dharma Trading’s cerulean and sapphire blues. And yet, he sat there in his chair, across from me in my chair, trying valiantly to unravel the second mess of his day that he didn’t cause. So I tug, he pulls, and more knots form, and that is how things go for for about 30 minutes, until I realize that working on different strands of yarn is making it harder on both of us. So I put down my bobbin and start tracing his strand of yarn, while he holds the end, until I hit a point where he could grab the traced yarn and pull it out of the mess. We sat there, he in his chair, and me now sitting on the floor, until nearly midnight – making jokes, chatting about whatever, and occasionally, I would start cursing the disaster we were trying to unravel, to which he would just roll his eyes and grin at me.

I would like to say that we got it all unraveled, and I am now working on a beautiful pair of socks. Except we didn’t. I gave up somewhere just before midnight, and he decided to see if he could yank apart some large knots. The end result of that experiment was a lot of smaller, very tight knots all over the floor – but I didn’t care. I may have lost several week’s worth of work due to not taking the time to wait out yarn drying, but I discovered that my husband, who previously thought all things fiber and yarn were crazy, had slowly, gradually, become a Fiber Husband who was willing to sit up until midnight with his fiber-obsessed wife to untangle a bunch of itty bitty yarn.

As we were getting ready for bed that night, I thanked him for all of his help, and apologized if it was boring –I know untangling yarn isn’t the most interesting activity. To my surprise, his response was a smiling:

“You’re welcome, I had fun.”

Who’d have thought?

On untangling yarn knots: “It’s a knot within a knot in the fabric of the yarn space-time continuum.”

(No pictures this time around – my normal computer has been packed up and put on a boat heading back to the US, so I’m on the laptop for now, and will have to take new pictures of the yarn mess and add them in later, in an edit. (: )

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