This little scale is exceedingly useful: when it’s getting tight re how much yarn I have left for a project, and I’m debating whether I can squeeze one more pattern repeat out of it, I can weigh the remaining ball as it shrinks along the way and know how much I’ll need. In the case of this Julia shawl, I think I’d better quit: I generally allocate twice as much yarn for the cast off row as a regular one on a circular shawl, and though it’s close, better safe than frogging.
As I weighed this, looking at the gap between the back of the piano and the wall and the size of this ball, I suddenly remembered reading in a newspaper-style newsletter that Interweave (I think it was) briefly published, a story about a knitter in DC who dropped her ball of llama yarn as she stepped off the Metro subway, realizing to her dismay that it had gone down between the train and the platform. I’m guessing she was about as close as I am here to being done with it anyway. So she sat down on the nearby bench and simply knitted till the last bit of yarn came bouncing back up at her. As she knitted, it gradually dawned on her that some of the people around her weren’t getting on the trains she thought they must be waiting for–and then, when that last bit of yarn twitched back up off the tracks, to her surprise, spontaneous applause burst out around her.
Wouldn’t it be cool to get that when you cast that last stitch off.
