Peanut Gets a Bath

I've run out of clean Peanut, time to wash another batch.  I never took pictures of the process last time, so here goes.  

Very dirty wool, full of hay and poop.

I put on my "poop gloves," a pair of yellow dish washing gloves, now dedicated solely to wool cleaning.  Then I pulled hay and debris out of enough wool to fill a turkey roasting pan that is also dedicated to wool cleaning.

You can see the dirty wool in the pan, contrasted with the clean spun wool on the bobbin.    

This is the wool in it's second bath (already a whole lot cleaner) next to the gross water from the first bath.  

And the third bath, next to the second bath water.  

The fourth, and probably final, bath.  You can see my poop gloves as well.  Peanut is now much much cleaner.  I'll let her soak for a bit more, then I'll take her out and let her dry on a towel before starting to spin her up into more singles.  

    

The last week (or so)

This is what I've been working on for the past week.

Actually the past year. It was supposed to be Josh's birthday present last year, and it didn't get done in time, or anywhere near time. One thing after another would go just a tiny bit wrong and it made me want to forget the bike existed for a long while. Then Josh kindly offered to help with his own present, and it's done! Well, mostly, bikes are in that class of object where something can always be done, improved, tweaked, upgraded, swapped out, etc. But it's complete enough to be considered done. We still have to adjust the bottom bracket's set screws (hopefully a five minute job) and next weekend I'll most likely be teaching Josh how to true the wheels (teach a man to fish and maybe he'll fix your bike while he's at it, actually I really like truing so we might have to fight over it). But we can both look at it and be proud and happy now. Yay!

Next post, back to the knitting.

I'm working on a brown ribbed cable front sweater. Right now I'm trying to design the cable, with mixed success and much grumpyness. I'll have photos of the swatches soon.

I'm also bouncing another cabled sweater around in my head, out of that red/purple Happy Feet sock yarn that I purchased a sweater's worth of. I haven't been swatching anymore of that though.

I bought new needles to knit Josh's gloves on. The yarn I bought and the sock needles I have were not playing nice. Their slick metal-ness would slide right out of the stitches at inopportune moments (not that any moment would really be a great time to drop stitches). I marched over to Loopy yarns Thursday after work and bought some nice pointy little bamboo needles. They should be much stickier, relatively speaking, and not give me the same trouble. I really want to take them out and play, but the brown cables are sucking up all my attention.