Wednesday, June 06, 2007

Yarn porn, and a wee little FO

Admire my photographic (total non-) skills.

This is Blue Sky Alpaca Organic Cotton, in color 83 (sage). It's worsted weight, but seems quite a lot thicker than other worsteds I've used. So far I'm using 8s and getting about 3.25 st/inch. Am I counting right? sacre bleu. But oh man is it soft.

Story time!
I have been using Dove body wash for like uber-sensitive skin with no perfumes or anything, and that's all well and good, except that the new bottle it comes in has a lid that's difficult to remove, and I usually like to use "Lotion Saver" bottle couplers to get the last bits of stuff from one bottle to the next so less gets wasted. But with lids that don't like being removed (or replaced once removed) and that lack the standard bottle threading that makes the lotion saver a viable tactic, that gets a little tricky. Not to mention, Dove is made by Unilver and they've made no promises (as far as I know) to, say, not torture animals in the name of testing their products. Add to that the fact that, even though the plastic bottles are recyclable, reduction is still always better. So I decided to go with bar soap. Specifically, Dr. Bronner's, a bar of which I picked up at Sun Harvest, in peppermint scent (one that's never caused me allergic reactions!). I was drawn to it because it's 100% cruelty-free, uses fair-trade ingredients, and has hemp oil, and I'm a huge fan of hemp.
I was feeling all good, but then I couldn't find my soap-saving sack thing from way back. Therefore, I made one. And none of the patterns online really satisfied me. I wanted to knit one because I like knitting, and crochet projects never really work out well for me. Plus, I wanted to use nylon yarn that I have lying around, and most of what I was finding called for worsted-weight cotton, which is great stuff, but takes forever to dry. So I just winged it. Wung it? Wang?

Sorry about that unsightly shadow. Anyway, it's pretty simple. Size four needles. Turkish cast-on 24 stitches (12 wraps), did a couple rounds stockinette then switched to seed-stitch until it was long enough, then a couple more st st rounds, a round of yo, k2tog, a couple more st st rounds, and bound off with a sz 9 so it wouldn't be too tight to get the soap in there. And it fits perfectly. And I already used it too, and it works great. Is it my imagination or did I get cleaner this morning than ever before? Dudes, my SOUL is cleaner.
That's probably the hemp talking.

Oh, one more thing: Those socks I made, they were only 40% wool, and superwash at that, but apparently even THAT is enough to irritate my stupid feet so FINE. I give up! I will seriously never try knitting wool things for myself ever again!