Walsall Wonderland

I’ve been talking about what I’m going to knit with a chunk of nice mohair for a while now, but half of it was knitted up into a part of a cardigan and has to be frogged before I can start my new project.

Now, mohair is notorious for being difficult to frog, to pull undone from a knitted piece and back to a single long strand of yarn, because of the fuzzy nature of mohair fibres, which are tiny corkscrew curls that want to go everywhere. They lock in with each other and hold, and that can be very, very, difficult to get undone. I’ve knit something in mohair before – leg warmers… what was I thinking!? – and upon seeing them on myself, promptly set out to frog them. But the yarn wasn’t in favour of that, and I still have a half frogged leg warmer in my knitting odds and ends drawer.

So, with this frogging, I’ve a weapon. I have a plan! Apparently, when you need to frog mohair, you should put it in the freezer for a while before you do so, because it makes the yarn a little less clingy, it seems to settle the yarn a bit, and then you can rip back with much greater ease! So, for the last two days I’ve had a bag of knitting in the freezer. It doesn’t need to be in there that long, but I got side-tracked by lots of things and haven’t gotten back to it.

Today’s knitting pattern is going to be a cute Lace Rib Shrug, that I really like. I’ve really been liking these circular shaped patterns, of late, not sure why. I love seeing what people do with their patterns on Ravelry, like this pattern for instance, you might wonder, is it really a good pattern? Well then you look at the ‘Projects’ page and you can see that this pattern knits up quite nicely for a variety of figures. I think being able to see what people have done with something before you knit it is an amazing advantage!