As The Yarn Turns

A Little Bit of Green

I thought I would include a little bit of green for Project Spectrum this time. Florence has quite a few metal sculptures downtown that are created by a local artist. I've grown so used to having them around that I often take them for granted. It's nice having them around though and you often see kids playing on some of them. This green dinosaur family caught my eye the other day and it seemed appropriate for May.

I haven't forgotten about my Opal socks. They're still not finished but they're close. I'm past the heel at least so the rest should move along quickly.

I should be able to make a lot of progress on them this weekend because I'll be in Dayton, Ohio for a convention this weekend. It's work related rather than fiber related but at least I'll have some travel time for knitting. I swear I think I do my best knitting when I travel. I have to admit that I'm not looking forward to going to Dayton. Everyone we've met from has been very nice. It's just that we have lousy luck in Dayton. Every time we go there, there is some sort crisis. Last time we had two flat tires, the second one before we had a chance to get the first one fixed. One other time, I lost the stone from my engagement ring. We haven't been to this particular convention in a few years though, so hopefully we've broken the trend. Katie and the ferrets have their sitter lined up and all have had their "be nice" pep talk. Now we just have to get packed up. I'm hoping to blog while I'm there, but that doesn't always work. If not, I'll catch up when I get back.

by Sydney  |

Fun With Fleece

I haven't only been dodging lightening strikes lately. I also spent time washing some fleece. I don't really have a good place to wash lots of fleece so I do a little bit at a time. Plus I'm new at this. I figure if I mess it up somehow, at least it won't be the whole fleece. So far I haven't repeated the same technique twice but I like this last one the best so I'll step through the process I used.

First I spread the fleece outside on the porch to remove any bits of hay, grass, or serious poopy bits. This fleece is Lincoln lamb fleece and it seems pretty clean. I swear though, I go through this stuff pretty thoroughly but as soon as it hits the soapy water a couple of blades of grass and a sprig or two of hay float up. I still haven't figured out where they hide.

Then I grab a few handfuls and put them in some mesh laundry bags I got from the dollar store. The fleece seems to get cleaner if I leave some extra space in there.

I've been washing two or three bags at a time. I put hot soapy water in two sinks but you could use buckets too. Last time I used liquid dishwashing detergent. It did okay. After some research, I decided to use laundry detergent this time. Now we use plain, unscented, no bleach detergent so that's what I used for the fleece. I put the bags in the first sink, pressed them down and let them sit for about 15 minutes. Every now and then I would go by and turn them over. At this point the water is pretty darned dirty.

I tell you what, the smell from that first wash brought all of the ferrets out of hiding and trying to find the source of the smell. I wish I had a chance to take a picture of their noses in the air. After 10-15 minutes, I drain the bags and place them in the second sink of soapy water for another 10-15 minutes. While the bags are soaking, I fill up the empty sink with water that's about the same temperature for a rinse cycle. I do two or three rinses to get all of the soap and dirty water out. This time I added a bit of hair conditioner to the first rinse. When I'm finished rinsing, I spin the fleece in the washing machine and then spread it out to dry on a sweater drier. This batch came out nice and clean and soft. So I'll probably stick with this method for a while.

Katie on the other hand, took advantage of all of the computer parts we had sitting around.

"What... you mean you didn't put this out here for me?!"

by Sydney  |