Blanket 1 So it turns out the grey yarn I was so fond of, in terms of color, turned out to be wool. After the blanket was washed, in both spots that I used it, there’s some extreme shrink. I wonder more if that’s due to the wool shrinking so much, or the knit of the blanket being so loose. Who knows. I don’t. I’m just doing. But it can’t stay like this, obviously, if I’m gonna keep working on this blanket. So at least for a day or so, the plan is gonna be to try my best to surgically remove the grey yarn, work on the blanket in other areas, and let everything relax and recover before adding new yarn to where the grey yarn used to be. Edit: LOL. Just started by undoing the wrong yarn, so I had to resecure that with some string and oh man, what a messy way to start. Edit 2: Nope. This wool isn't going anywhere. It's fused to itself. It's fused to the yarn adjacent to it. It's fused to the blanket. How?! In other news, my mother sent me a scroll sewing frame that she’s had for years but never used. It’s 1’x2’, so it’s a bit too big for the smaller pieces I work on. But for this blanket (and potentially other larger projects I might be crazy enough to attempt), it’ll be perfect. So yeah, that’s a win right there. The other month I was a bit bored, so I worked on my jacket’s collar a bit more. Instead of adding fabric, because the spots I was working on were so tiny, I just did blanket stitches around the border of the worn out areas. As you can tell, I’m kind of alternating back and forth between thread colors to give it some variety and character. I’ve worn it many, many times and washed it probably twice since working on it, and it’s held up great. Lastly, no pic, because it’s a box of paper. Recently though, I got a box of Southworth Business Paper. It’s really nice (with the exception that Southworth tends to use really obnoxiously big watermarks) and I look forward to trying to make text blocks out of it. . . . still need to work on that dang eagle.
I'm no knitter. My wife? My wife's a knitter. The process is 1) Knit a test swatch so you can see how it reacts to your needles and ensure you have enough yarn 2) knit the whole thing 3) wet block it 4) Give it to whatever friend or relative it was promised to I encourage you to keep on "just doing" but I will also say that a little planning ahead of time will radically increase your satisfaction with the finished product. Mixing different fibers is going to induce a wretched nonlinearity into your project. My wife won't even mix different batches of the same yarn; the colors shift.
Yeah. As a medium, yarn is probably the most frustrating I've ever worked with, so kudos to both our wives for putting up with it. I totally never intended to use wool, knowing it would pull a stunt like this, bit fortunately, for my next phase, I have yarn with the wrappers still and they're all acrylic. It's funny, cause this whole thing is more about doing than results, but I still care a little about the results. That said, I'm kind of intrigued by the wool fusing to everything and what it might do for repair work, so I'm gonna keep that property running in the back of my head and see if I can't come up with some ideas and experiments.