At 07:44 PM 12/21/05 -0800, suzy wrote: >also what is the best way to preshrink wool?
I wind my wool yarn into long, thin skeins and plunge them into hot water before knitting gloves, socks and sweaters. If the finished garments are washed carefully in cold water, they don't shrink. (That means *soak* them clean, don't *scrub* them clean.) The water should be hot enough that you have to use a spoon to make the yarn sink, but there should be no agitation at all. If the yarn is agitated, it will tangle and felt together. Let it soak until it's comfortable to put your hands in to lift it out. (You let it cool before lifting it out because it's less likely to felt at a lower temperature.) You can spin the water out in a top-loading washer -- set for the *final* spin, to be sure it doesn't fill or agitate. (Even the small agitation cause by water running in can tangle and felt yarn.) If there isn't a lot of yarn, you can pile it in a dish-draining rack until it drips instead of streaming, then blot it with towels. In either case, dry it lying flat on clean towels, moving each skein to a dry patch of towel at intervals. All of the yarn for a given project should go through the same bath. Skeins bathed separately might lose different amounts of dye, or otherwise not match. -- Joy Beeson http://home.earthlink.net/~joybeeson/ http://home.earthlink.net/~dbeeson594/ROUGHSEW/ROUGH.HTM http://home.earthlink.net/~beeson_n3f/ -- Writers' Exchange west of Fort Wayne, Indiana, U.S.A. - To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
