I have also given up pulling from the center. Anyone as tangleriffic as I am is only asking for trouble by doing that.

I wish what I had done was asked if Katy would have wound it on her ball winder to end up with a cake.

I worked on it some more but at the core is a knot that I think is felted together.

I started to pull from the outside and then changed because everyone I see knitting always pulls from the center.

Have you guys seen the Couture Hats knitting book? (I'm guessing that you knit and then felt the hats.)

A lot of those don't look felted in the picture. I might need to put that book on my wishlist.

So I heard back from the yarn company. They are going to authorize a replacement skein, and asked if I was willing to send mine to them so the mill could figure out what happened. And they are giving me one of their pattern books as a free gift for helping them figure out the problem.

I'm floored. And their response has now changed my mind and I'll be buying yarn from them in the future.

My grandma always taught me to unwind the entire thing and make a ball. Which is what I always do but I'm always anxious to get started knitting when that happens.

eta: and I just discovered there is a really cool yarn shop right across the street and down the block from my office. I was looking at $90 balls of yarn yesterday, but SO PRETTY!

Customer service, bitches!

I ran down to the yarn shop to tell Katy this and look at some of the books she has so I could really pick out the one I wanted.

They have some sweater patterns up to size 3x! And some of the patterns only went to XXL but it seemed the majority had a wide range of sizes, which is another reason to recommend them.

Hmm, those hats must have some sort of infrastructure to get them to maintain their shape, right?

Crocheted food: [link]