Every so often you get halfway through a project and realise you no longer like it.
Early on I used to keep going anyway, out of a conviction that you finish what you start. At some point I decided my time was too valuable to spend knitting things I did not want, and that the hours already spent were a sunk cost. Ripping out hard work is painful, but it is less painful than finishing something destined for the back of a cupboard.
Why frogged yarn looks wrong
When you unravel knitting, the yarn comes off bumpy and crinkled – it has been sitting in the shape of the stitches, sometimes for weeks, and it holds that shape. Knit straight back up with it and the fabric will be uneven, because the kinks resist sitting flat.
The fix is to relax the fibre and let it forget.
Reclaiming the yarn
Wind it into a hank. Loop the yarn loosely around your arm, or around the back of a chair, until you have a large ring. Do not wind it into a ball – a ball keeps the yarn under tension and you will be back where you started.
Tie the hank in a few places. Three or four loose ties of scrap yarn around the ring, spaced evenly. This stops it tangling in the next step, and it is the step people skip and regret.
Wet it. Soak the hank in lukewarm water. A little wool wash is fine but not necessary; the water is doing the work.
Hang it to dry. Let the water drip out without wringing. The weight of the water pulls the kinks out as it dries.
For stubborn crinkles, hang a small weight from the bottom of the hank – but keep it light. Too much weight will stretch the yarn permanently and you will have thin, lifeless yarn instead of kinked yarn.
What works and what does not
Wool and other animal fibres respond beautifully. They are elastic, they relax when wet, and they set into their new shape as they dry. Reclaimed wool is often indistinguishable from new.
Cotton and linen relax less, because they have little memory to begin with. They come out straighter than they went in but rarely perfect.
Acrylic is the difficult one. It does not respond to water in the same way, and the usual advice is to steam it – hold a steam iron just above the hank without touching it. Be careful: acrylic melts, and direct contact with a hot iron will ruin it.
Let it dry completely
Wind it into a ball only when the hank is fully dry. Damp yarn wound into a ball will hold the crinkle again, and you will have done the whole job for nothing.
