Knit Sisters

First, let me say thanks to Alex for his thought-provoking post yesterday.  I’m going to have to read it again just to make sure I have a good grasp of all the salient points!

Yesterday I started washing the lamb’s wool I got from John.  When I wash my wool, I do it in my kitchen sink; I used to wash fleece in my washing machine, but then we got a front-loading washer, and it doesn’t work so well for washing fleece, although it’s a gem in all other ways.  But I digress.  I put the wool in lingerie bags and wash it in the hottest water that will come out of the tap.  (Pretty hot.)  I add some plain old laundry detergent to the water.  (Purex Free and Clear in my case.)

First wash:

 

I soak this for about 20-30 minutes. Then I pull it out of that water, gently squeeze as much dirty water as I can from the bags of wool, run another sink full of very hot water, add detergent, add wool, and soak for another 20-30 minutes.  Second wash:

 

Repeat the above procedure, sans detergent.  (We’re rinsing now.)  First rinse:

Repeat squeezing, running water, soaking, etc. for a second rinse.  (I didn’t take a picture of that one since it looks much the same.)  Then I put the bags into my washing machine for just the spin cycle (very important) and spin all the excess water out.  Finally, I hang them up to dry, outside if at all possible.

And I get this:

                                   (That’s Rob’s finger poking into the shot.)

I love wool.

I worked on my Blue Bamboo swatches yesterday as well, but first I had to (you guessed it) rip out the old ones.  I rethought and redesigned the leaf motif for the back of the sweater, so it grows organically out of the bamboo stitch and is no longer applied as a separate piece.  This was quite a feat of charting, let me tell you.

I also fiddled a bit with the leaf edging. 

As you can see, the edging is still on the needles.  I’m still thinking about how to finish this edging.  I woke up this morning with a cool idea in my head:  wouldn’t it be great to face the edging with a lighter-weight, slinky yarn like rayon?  Kind of like a lining in a jacket.  A visit to the stash seems in order.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 3rd, 2006 at 2:40 pm and is filed under Designing woman, It's the process. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.