Unraveling A Scarf Mystery

Knitting is one of the things I haven't had much time to do since Owen's arrival.  But now that his sleep has improved, I figure I'll have more time in the evening to perhaps start working on a few of the many projects in my knitting queue.

To get myself back into the knitting mode, I decided to get some of Muench's Touch Me yarn, a soft chenille I had once used to knit myself a scarf.  I also decided that I wouldn't really follow a pattern, but just use a simple garter stitch, so that I could knit while watching TV in the evenings with Sean.

I find it hard to remember:

Touch Me is the yarn and Please Touch is the museum....

So I started my project slowly and all was well, except that soon I noticed strange loops in the scarf that looked like I had dropped a stitch or made some other such error.  Now I have many knitting flaws, but in the 15 or so years I've been knitting, I think I have dropped maybe two stitches.  It just isn't something I've ever had a problem with.  So I was flummoxed by these loops.  I also didn't think they were dropped stitches because I still had the same amount of stitches on my needles as I did when I started.

Can you see the annoying loop smack in the middle of the picture?

And yes, I realize the scarf looks like it is knit out of puffed wheat cereal;

just trust me that Touch Me is the softest yarn ever.

I began to fixate and stress and generally be a very bad TV-watching sofa partner, as I kept holding up the scarf and looking at the holes and loops and then sighing and becoming more and more annoyed with myself.  Had baby brain permanently affected my knitting skills?  Was I only going to be able to produce lopsided sweaters and scarves that started out looking moth-eaten?

Then Sean saved the day by patiently suggesting that I google the name of the yarn and "problem" together and see what came up.  And of course what came up is that Touch Me is a heavy chenille, and thus known to "worm", which is what the loops were that kept appearing in my project.  I also discovered though that one option is to wash or "felt" the finished product to make it appear like a crushed velvet, and the felting process will mask the worming.

Another view of a worm:

So there you have it.  I am not afflicted with a sudden and inexplicable knitting incompetence.  Touch Me worms.

Mystery solved.