Finished Object Dance

There's a new knit-along called Knit Unto Others, which I found on Carole's blog, focusing on knitting for charity for the season. The site just got started, but already has lots of links to ideas for things a knitter could do for the rest of the world, if they were of a mind to and didn't have an obvious target for their goodwill in sight.

I'm popping out these hats like there's no tomorrow, one drying/shaping, three in the dryer at the moment and a fifth about a 1/3rd of the way done on the needles. Since I was doing laundry today, I tried the two hats in the dryer soaking wet with the clothes from the washer (which had been spun dry). Didn't work so well. For one thing, I noticed that without the sopping wet towels to go with them, the hats were drying more than they were shrinking. The other thing is that when I resoaked them and tried some more the clothes started getting kind of crispy dry and definately needed to come out. So, at the end of a dryer cycle I had damp hats that were only about a 1/4 felted. Some much for that idea. At the moment, I have the dryer free to put in 2 sopping towels and now 3 hats (2 that were a quarter felted already and one finished in the course of the afternoon) so we'll see how that turns out.

I suspect the lack of felting is a combination of 1. the dryer was fuller (with a full load of wash) so there may not have been as much agitation/room for the abuse to take place than a dryer that has only two towels and a few hats in it. 2. the other items weren't sopping wet, they were already spun dry so there isn't as much water available as there usually is in my setup.

So much for combining purposes. I thought I would save energy, but if the idea doesn't work, well, it doens't work.

Makes me wonder about machine drying a few sweaters that have gotten a bit too big lately, though..... hmmm.