Most of my tricks depend on one thing: taking the yarn from the centre of the ball, instead of the outside –
Admittedly, sometimes it takes a bit more fishing about than this video shows. However, using the yarn from the centre-out means the ball stays in one place and isn’t bouncing around the floor.
So, we have our wool sitting nicely, in one place, not gathering dirt and cat-hair.
Most of my colourwork is in the Fair Isle vein: 2 colours in each row/round. For this, I hold one yarn in my right hand, and the other yarn in my left hand – usually the dominant colour in my right hand as I am a British-style knitter:
This allows me to keep one ball on my left-hand side, and the other on my right-hand side – so they can’t get twisted up.
On the rare occasions where I use more than 2 colours per row/round, I have a few different techniques.
if the 3 (or more) colours are used in roughly equal amounts and/or regularly across the row/round, I usually just work across/around with 2, using the two-handed technique above, and slipping the stitches to be worked in the other colours; then, I work the other colour(s) across/around, slipping the stitches in the first two.
if the colours are not very equally or regularly used across/around, then I use a knitting thimble.
Prym knitting thimble.
if I’m using a lot of colours in very irregular amounts, it’s usually intarsia or ‘picture’ knitting. Then, I wind a metre or so of each colour onto a yarn bobbin, which can hang at the back of the work wherever that colour is needed:
I do not like the knitting thimble as I’m a fairly tight knitter and find Continental knitting (yarn in the left hand) lends itself to lots of annoying dropped stitches, but needs must. I have been known to combine techniques, e.g., two-handed knitting with a thimble when working with one dominant colour (right hand) and 2 or more non-dominant colours (left hand).
You can use these yarns for arm-knitting too, but that’s a different topic.
You can, of course, use these huge needles with finer yarns: it produces a lacier effect. Here’s a video showing how to knit your own hammock, suspended on giant needles:
The other main form of extreme knitting is multi-strand knitting. In this, multiple balls, skeins, hanks of yarn are worked together as one – again on the giant needles. Here’s Rachel John knitting a mattress with 1,000 yarns on a pair of sharpened trees:
A third form of extreme knitting gets very little press. Extreme miniature knitting:
The image above is an Aran vest by Althea Crome, the designer for the movie Coraline. She produces 1:12 miniatures on 0.25mm diameter steel pins, using fine silk embroidery thread at around 3 stitches to the millimetre (80 sts/inch)!! OR LESS!!!
It was their fluffy winter undercoat, and, come spring, it gradually fell out – if you have cats or dogs, you’ll see this exact process happening all over your sofa and best outfits.
There is evidence that sheep were domesticated 9-11,000 years ago, and that they were being bred specifically for their wool 6,000 years ago in Iran. NB: this is what we have evidence for – sheep may have been domesticated and bred for wool earlier, but we don’t have evidence for that.
Primitive sheep still retain their ability to cast their fleece:
It’s possible to reverse shrinking, to a certain extent. The type of garment shrunk matters, as does the degree of shrinkage. The garment is, however, unlikely to recover to its former glory. The simpler the garment, the better the outcome: for example, a scarf or shawl will stretch out better than a glove or jumper. In general, it’s not worth trying this on baby garments: put them on one of the baby’s dolls or teddies instead.
The technique involves wetting the garment thoroughly and stretching it. You’ll need a lot of muscle power to do the stretching – you are, after all, tearing the bonds between the fibres that have snagged together. The garment should be pinned out at its maximum dimensions and be allowed to dry naturally. It’s sometimes possible to repeat this procedure for improved results, but the downside is that the fibres will weaken, and you may tear holes in it.
If this fails, you could gift it to someone whom it will fit! Alternatively, it could be cut up for use as placemats, cushions, or even blankets.
Because people nowadays are incapable of critical thinking.
Until about the 1980s, fibre crafts – knitting, crochet, weaving – were part of the curriculum in primary schools around the world. Boys learned, as well as girls. Many would have learned to card and spin fleece at home from an early age. Unfortunately, this practice disappeared in many countries. The last people to have gone through it are middle-aged, 40s+. Some are amongst the recent resurgence of interest in the fibre arts.
With the disappearance of fibre crafts from schools, so too did the simple knowledge that “older women” knit and crochet because they – and their brothers – learned to knit and crochet as very young children.
I am, I believe, not yet an “old” woman at 52, 53 later this year. I have been knitting for 48–49 years, and crocheting for 47–48 years.
The few remaining critical thinkers among you will have observed from the above that I have been knitting and crocheting since I was a very young child. Not an “older woman”.
Moreover, I was taught to knit by my 30-something FATHER. Not an “older woman”.
Look at the size of those hands. His wedding ring was the size of a toddler’s bracelet.
He taught me to knit AFTERteaching my younger brother, also not an “older woman”.
My uncle Victor, of whom I have written occasionally, was a mining engineer who began his career in the 1950s. At the time, there was a great push to explore uninhabited regions of the world for possibly useful minerals. Uncle Victor travelled to places that no human had ever set foot in, and certainly no Westerner. Having lived in some of the most inhospitable regions on the planet – places of extreme cold, heat, humidity, and low-oxygen environments – he was one of a number of people invited by NASA in the 1960s to consult on and provide physiologuical data for the Apollo program. He met Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong when they were mere hopefuls.
Why do I mention this? Well, Uncle Victor’s amazing career was made possible not by his academic knowledge of mining engineering and geology, or his experience. It was made possible because he knew how to knit, sew, and cook from childhood. He didn’t need to rely on a woman or an extensive support network to sew on his buttons, darn his socks, or make his dinner, so his employers could send him into regions where there were no women or support networks.
Cotton yarn expands when washed. It lacks the little scales that wool has, which can interlock causing shrinkage. So that fitted cotton sweater you bought will most likely become a baggy sweater after the first wash.
A blend of cotton and wool will, on balance, retain its shape – the cotton expanding and the wool shrinking should cancel each other out, although a lot depends on the relative composition.
Cotton wool pads – the kind of thing you take your makeup off with – will appear to shrink, but that’s only because they’re floofed up with air in the package. As soon as they get damp – with water or makeup remover – the air gets removed, and you get a flat pad of cotton.
Firstly, you need to know that wool garments do NOT need to be washed often. Hang them outside or beside an open window for a few hours after wearing – that’s all that’s needed mostly. Really: wool wicks off sweat and kills the BO bugs. Soiling can be scraped off carefully when dry, then shake out the garment and put it straight back on. For those particularly nasty stains, like red wine or tomato sauce, most can be soaked off on a very soapy solution followed if necessary with a rinse in a white vinegar solution. If any staining remains, you can reduce its visibility by gently plucking out some of the stained fibres. Never, ever use bleach on wool: it causes wool to melt and disappear.
So. Given that you only need to clean that pure wool suit or sweater every other month, you could consider getting it professionally cleaned. If, like me, even this small splurge sets your Scottish ancestors birling out of their graves to wail and groan at you of a night, you can hand-wash it on cool-ish water with a suitable wool washing agent (okay, okay Great-uncle Hamish, back in your box) or the cheapskate option, shampoo – for dry hair if possible. If your deceased Irish granny is giving you nocturnal earache about how she didn’t work three jobs to scrimp and save so that her grandchildren could wash their clothes by hand, you could use the wool programme on your washing machine. Again: really. Mine have survived front-loaders and top-loaders.
Then, the issue is the drying thereof. Unless the wool is “superwash” – it should say on the label – no tumble driers. Instead, roll the garment in a bath towel and squeeze, don’t wring the excess water out. Lay it out flat and pulled into shape and leave it somewhere airy and/or warm (but not in direct sunlight, or close to a heat source).
Because painting ourselves blue turned out to be a tad redundant?
Because somewhere along the route out of Africa, we figured out that wearing skins meant a dead animal who couldn’t provide us with milk, whereas wearing fleece meant a living animal AND more baby animals who could provide fleece and milk?
Because it’s insulating, waterproof, fireproof, and easy to manipulate into textiles?
Because a renewable resource is better than polluting the planet with plastic fibres derived from non-renewable fossil fuels?
Like the grease in your hair, it’s there to lubricate and condition the hair (kemp) and undercoat, thereby keeping it soft, smooth, and damage-free.
Unlike us, the sheep does not strip off its natural moisturiser with harsh soaps and shampoos, and therefore does not suffer from frizz, fly-aways and split ends, therefore (again unlike us) they don’t need to re-grease their hair with oily conditioners, masks and serums and styling products, which often contain lanolin (or a near-identical chemical) as the moisturising agent.
However, some sheep do get the full salon treatment for shows:
Most people who claim to be allergic to wool have simply been wearing (or were forced to wear) wool that is not fit for purpose.
Wool comes in many qualities, from soft enough for baby skin (e.g., most merino, Blue-faced Leicester, Wensleydale) to fire- and chemical-resistant industrial carpeting. Historically, people wore underwear in the softer wools,
and outerwear in progressively rougher wool, up to Melton fulled twill for weather-resistant coats. Even then, there were differences: trousers or skirts for indoor wear were typically in softer wool, and usually worsted-spun*; outdoor clothing was more usually in sturdier, coarser wools, often blended with mohair, woollen-spun*, and ideally should be lined if you’re not wearing your merino long-johns or cotton petticoat underneath.
In addition, a lot of these ‘wool allergies’ come from a time when wool blends became A Thing because (1) the wool industry was going into decline and (2) more people had washing machines and wanted to wash their woollens in them. So your granny couldn’t afford the quality wool when she was knitting your school jumpers, and used a crappy wool blend with scratchy plastic in it, the washing machine battered the crap out of it, part-felted it á la Melton – and you blamed the wool.
So, the simplest solution for people who find wool scratchy – apart from buying better-quality woollen goods – is to wear something else next to the skin, such as a shirt under Granny’s Christmas sweater that she knitted specially for you with her crippled, arthritic hands, you ungrateful brat. Or you can try ‘superwash’ wool, which has the sticky-outy scales on each fibre chemically stripped off, which means it won’t felt, and isn’t (as) scratchy.
However some people are allergic to lanolin, the natural grease in wool. This is a pretty serious issue, as lanolin is the skin-softening ingredient in many lotions and moisturisers, and finds its way into soaps and makeup too.
To my knowledge, only sheep’s wool contains lanolin. That leaves a huge range of yarns available – note, I say ‘yarn’. Wool comes from sheep, yarn comes from everything else. You can choose from –
Animal
Angora:
English
French
German
Giant
Satin
Camellid:
Alpaca
Huacaya Alpaca
Suri Alpaca
Camel
Guanaco
Llama
Paco-vicuña cross
Vicuña
Cervid:
Cashgora (Cashmere-Angora cross)
Cashmere goat
Mohair
Nigora cross
PCA (Pygmy-Cashmere cross)
Pygora (Pygmy-Angora cross)
Silk:
Bombyx / Cultivated / Mulberry
Eri (Peace Silk)
Muga
Tussah
Other:
Arctic Fox
Bison
Cat
Chinchilla
Dog
Highland Cattle
Horse
Mink
Musk Ox / Qiviut
Possum
Reindeer
Wolf
Yak
Plant
Cellulose:
Bast Bamboo
Flax (linen)
Hemp
Nettle
Paper
Ramie
Cotton:
Acala / Upland
Egyptian
Naturally Colored Cotton
Pima
Manufactured:
Acrylic
Angelina
Carbonized Bamboo
Corn (Ingeo)
Chitin
Microfiber
Milk (Casein)
Nylon / Polyamide
Pearl
Polyester
Rayon / Viscose
Rayon from Bamboo
Rayon from Banana
Rose
Seaweed/SeaCell
Silver
Soy Silk
Stainless Steel
Sugar Cane
Tencel / Lyocell
Full disclosure: I haven’t tried all of these.
Of those I have tried, I would recommend the following as a substitute for wool:
Alpaca – any;
Cashmere;
Muskox/Qivuit for next to skin softness;
Angora – if and only if you aren’t afflicted with the scratchies. Angora is incredibly soft, but fuzzy and therefore tickly;
Bamboo bast or rayon – suitable for baby-soft skin;
Pima cotton – even though it dries the hands out as a knitting yarn;
Banana or soy silk – baby-soft;
Milk or milk and cotton blends;
Sugarcane;
High-quality acrylic, if you absolutely, positively must. It fills the seas with plastic micro-fibres, so think long and hard before you spend (serious, like cashmere-serious) money on this.
Of these, in terms of value for money, I’d go for alpaca, bamboo and cotton, in that order.
* – Worsted spinning sees the wool combed before spinning, so that all the individual fibres are parallel. It produces smooth, non-fuzzy yarn which weaves to a superior fine fabric. Woollen-spun yarns are simply carded without combing: the fibres are higgledy-piggledy and produces a fluffy, round yarn which is wonderfully warm – one example being Melton fabric, used for coats and blankets. While woollen-spun fibres are popular with handknitters, and worsted-spun with weavers, it is possible to use woollen-spun in weaving and worsted-spun in knitting.
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