I had enough yarn.

(Whew! Oh, yeah! Huzzah!)

I completed the lace border last night with a ball about the size of a cherry tomato remaining.  It finishes the all-over lace beautifully.  And I do love leaf patterns 🙂  I admit to a bout of nerves as I worked the through the middle section (at the beginning I was fairly confident and at the end I could see that I was going to make it, so it was sort of a triumphant romp to the bind-off).  The real drama, however, came about midway when I discovered that the yarn ball had collapsed into tangled, knotted up mess!

Linen yarn is wonderful, but certainly a different beast from wool.  In the "cake" (the cylindrical form generated with a yarn winder), it wants to spring free.  While it is wrapped firmly, it will behave itself.  But as you knit and the cake decreases, the yarn is loosened and strands and whole layers of strands escape until the cake finally explodes.  If you catch it early enough, you can capture it in a hand-wound ball.  I, however, let it go too long and my working yarn snagged.  And then I did the logical, but calamitous thing:  I started tugging on it.  That triggered the Black Hole Effect.  The yarn imploded into a snaggly, tormented, clenched, useless mess.  It took me something like 2 hours to work out the tangles and knots and wind the yarn into a workable ball.  I did most of it during our family Fantasy Baseball draft.

So between the Battle of the Ball and the risk of running out of yarn, this little swath of lace has been pretty exciting.  With a triumphant ending — like in "Armageddon" when they save the world from the asteroid.  Woohoo! Oh yeah!