Saturday, 18 August 2018

Baking Day

I woke up this morning feeling like it might be a good idea to do a little baking today.  I am completely inspired by the things I was doing earlier this week.  

Ordinarily you would think my urge to bake would be inspired by the delicious zucchini bread that frazzledknitter brought with her when she came to visit my new yarn 'finds' the other day, and you would be close, but not quite.  I do feel like making some bread this week, inspire by that loaf and also by the giant zucchini that our neighbour gave us the other day, but that really isn't what I felt like baking today.

This morning, I got up and started baking this.


Yes yarn. hahaha

A couple years ago, when I was about to move back to my big house from my wee house, I was on the cusp of a moth infestation.  When I found this out, I packed up any exposed yarn and put it in the car to move.  Since this was in the open, and being knit on at the time, I always figured it would need a little something before I ever worked on it again.  I may have done an in car heat treatment, in fact I think I did, but I wasn't positive. I knew that when it came out again, it would be baked in the oven, and brought to heat for an hour, even though the internet says half an hour.    

I came across the yarn when I was stash diving, and it just felt like the time to do it. So here I am baking the yarn, readying it for knitting again.

The yarn is in fine condition, with no evidence of damage at all. **see below I may have caught it before any eggs were laid (not likely) or done an in car heat treatment before hatching could have taken place.  Yay me.  I still gave it a heat treatment.  It never hurts.

My plan is to use this for a Hun sweater.  The colour plan is this but I really hope I took notes in the book by the chart.  It just would make life easier.


All the open work is going to be rust though.  What you see above was how I decided that.  I love the way the rust makes it all pop.

When I stopped knitting on it, it was because I needed to go back and sort out the problem I had in the yoke.  I had forgotten a set of increases and it mattered.  I pulled back the proto sweater


and now I just have to figure out what needles size I was using. I did not write that down.  I checked.  It looks like a 4 so I will start with that and hope.  I am going to go back through the trusty blog though.  Maybe I mentioned it as I started. If not, a 4 it is.  Worse come to worse, I just have to pull back again and thankfully, the yarn is plenty sturdy enough.

What struck me as I was busy prepping the yarn this morning, what was really interesting as I put my hand in the full bags of yarn, was how soft it felt.  Yes there is the traditional' scratchy feeling if I put it to my neck, but the yarn in the skeins, and even more interesting is the knitted parts?  Soft. Interesting. Really good in a homemade kind of way.  Not soft in a Mad Tosh kind of way, or soft like a bag of pure bamboo yarn, but soft in its own very special way.  I am looking forward to this.

The kitchen smells like sheep and farms, and that alone makes me feel like knitting.  It is almost a shame that the plan is to finish the Easy Bulky One before Stash Dash is over in ten days. Right now, in this moment, I am completely in love with Lopi.

**The only yarn that was affected in the great moth affair, was in the basket that I first found signs of damage in.  Most of that yarn was trashed but for 1 skein of Art Yarns Cashmere 1 and a skein of  Handmaiden Rumple.  I just couldn't bear to toss those.  They were heat treated in the car and other than one spot on the cashmere, have suffered no further damage.  The vast majority of my satsh has always lived in plastic bags, and these days, all yarn is in sealable plastic Ziplocs even when they are being knit. Sweaters too, when stored. OK, mostly in bags. I sometimes forget a project is sitting out. Perfection is hard.

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