Adventures in felting

Shawl knitting is coming along nicely. I have about a foot of edging left to knit but I am going to need another ball of yarn. Morning found me in my study see what other things I could work on today.

A couple weeks ago, I unearthed this project. It is the practise piece for Mr. Needles stranded colour work vest. (On going knitting, just not today) My goal for this practise piece has always been to felt it.

I haven't really done much felting and the felting that I did was a carefully measured swatch to see what the change in size from unfelted to felted would be. Hey why don't I felt!

I did exactly what I did last time, and heated up some water and put it in my mixer (big kitchenaid type) and put on the blade and turned it on. Disaster. I had forgotten to lock the machine into place. It started bouncing all over the cabinet as the blade tried to work its way around the knitting. Water was flung everywhere.

'Self', I says, 'you need to turn that machine to a slower setting.' I reached in around the sloshing to change the speed. A wave of hot water splashed on my hand and instead of slowing the beast down, I knocked the lever forward to speed things up.

By now, the entire kitchen was bouncing along with the darn machine as the blade tried to get by the knitting. Water was flinging through the air. Bubbles were spitting out of the bowl. I wasn't going to reach for the switch again. I didn't think I could without burning my hand.

In the millisecond as I reached to pull the mixers plug, I thought, 'you know, the way your luck is running this morning, you just might electrocute yourself. You are standing in a puddle of hot soapy water. Your clothes are drenched.' Time slowed right down and I had the most amazingly clear conversation with myself. Almost eloquent. Yet, if I didn't do something, the machine was going to bounce its way to the floor so I reached and yanked. With the power off, I had a chance to look at the disaster. Water was slopped all over my floors, the counter and way over to the table where my knitting was. I wiped up the floor, and took a good look at the bowl with the sopping wet knitting in it.

In the way that the completely delusional think about things, I decided the problem was quite clearly the blade on the machine. What I really should have been using was the dough hook.

Yeah, that's it. Lets put the dough hook on that puppy and get the felting done.

If you can't figure out what happened, just go right back to the top and read this whole scene over again. This time, I did lock the machine in place. No bouncing.

I'm going to go have coffee now. Might take some Aspirin too.