The Naughty, Knotty Yarn

I had a naughty yarn diet slip. I'd say it was the equivalent 'food diet' slip of frozen yogurt... a whole half gallon in one sitting. Whoops. It was the full bag sale that got me. And peer pressure. And splitting shipping costs. But I don't regret it, because the yarn is gorgeous.

Noro Silk Garden 244 from full bag sale (aka 10 balls)

You may notice that there are quite a few varied size balls of yarn there. Well, not only is this my naughty yarn, it is VERY. KNOTTY. YARN. Of the 10 balls I rewound, 8 balls had knots! I rewound each ball twice. On the first rewind, I only found 3 knots... not too bad. On the second rewind, I found 5 more knots! Of those knots, 6 knots had huge disruptions in the color scheme. Ugh. So I cut out all of the knots and got the resulting 18 balls of yarn.

Lined up by size, with naughty knots visible.

Geez Noro! What is up? Why so many knots? I know that this is a common problem, but that doesn't make it ok. Where is the QC? I'm assuming that it is a by-product of the spinning process that makes the beautiful color gradations. But tying all those knots must take a lot of time & resources. Why don't they just improve the process? Sorry... a bit of a rant there. I honestly didn't really mind the thearaputic winding and rewinding last night during the election results. Something to be said about stratigically cutting out the bad bits of something good??

Anyway, after I had all my balls wound, I tried to find a knitting order for the balls that would keep the color shifts somewhat on track. I think I succeeded. I'm going to make Lady Eleanor (ravlink) with this yarn and I'm itching to cast-on. I even researched knitting backwards and watched a YouTube demonstration. However, I really have to keep chugging away at the Christmas knitting. Someday...