Confessions of a Yarn Abuser

The other night, CawfeeMate taught me how to make my very first pom-pom for a hat I had finished. While winding the yarn around the cardboard donuts, he told me to wind it “tightly”. When it came time to snip it off the cardboard, he couldn’t because it had made the cardboard buckle and bend under it. before the second attempt he looked at me and said, “when I say ‘wind it tightly’ I mean ‘old lady/grandma-with-arthritis’ tightly. Not ‘I’m CawfeeGuy and I make yarn cry’ tightly”.
Hello, I’m CawfeeGuy and I’m an abusive knitter. I make yarn cry and snap needles in half.



It’s not that my hands are particularly big; they’re actually kinda small, for a guy and I usually have to buy or make gloves in women’s sizes. I just have a predilection toward tight knitted fabric and the proportional grip strength of a baby lemur or koala. See, when I knit, I make my stitches so tightly that the yarn squeaks against the needles. Sometimes Oftentimes the yarn just can’t take the strain and will break. I can’t count the number of times I’ll be knitting “in the zone” and the yarn breaks, forcing me to un-knit back, so I can re-join the broken yarn. Broken yarn is nothing, though, when compared with a broken knitting needle; you can always re-attach yarn. I once broke an entire set of (five) brand new white birch dpns while knitting a sock for the CawfeeMate; not by sitting on them, just by knitting. One after the other, they snapped in my gorilla grip, and I had to finish the sock round using the splinters. SWEARTUGAWD.

I’ve tried to knit looser, but I’m fairly convinced that a person’s knitting gauge is like their handwriting; each knitter has their own way of knitting their stitches. As it happens, my gauge is the knitting version of Elvish. Usually, on a particular project, my gauge is so out of whack, I have to go up two or three needle sizes to get close to that what the pattern’s author intended; if I decide to switch up the yarn in a project, I usually have to get CawfeeMate help me out. Luckily, I keep him on retainer, for a modest fee of handmade socks, paid as often as I can knit them. For now, the only thing that works is metal or super strong wood needles and the resignation that the yarn is going to break; it’s inevitable.

As for the pom-pom, the second one worked out well when I reined it in, but I’ve heard that they make hard plastic pom-pom makers. I wonder if they’ve been tested on Sicilian grandmas who open their own peperoncini jars?