Adventures In Wooly Appreciation

As a knitter and a crocheter, I am a big fan of wool.  Any animal fiber, really…anything from sheep, alpaca, bison, goats, etc…Quite aside from the fact that it’s cozy and durable and will keep you warm even if it’s wet, it’s also remarkably fire retardant.

I don’t know if anyone remembers how, when shopping for clothing and bedding for children, we used to look for the label “fire retardant,” but that’s still a thing.  These days, most commercially made clothing and bedding for children has been treated to be fire resistant, which means we’ve all gotten out of the habit of looking for that label.

But what about handmade items gifted to families with children?  I know that wool (well, wool that hasn’t been treated to be “washing machine safe”) has to be handwashed in tepid water with wool wash.  Personally, I don’t mind doing that.  I handwash all my wooly items, whether the wool has been treated or not.  And I have a LOT of clothing knit from wool.  But for the busy, harried mother whose child makes a mess of everything on a regular basis, handwashing might be too much to ask.  So I understand why they might prefer acrylic blankies that can just be thrown in the washer and dryer.

But I really wish to make my point about fire-resistant fiber.  To that end, I’ve made a short video, showing what happens when flame is applied to cotton yarn (untreated in any way except that it was dyed), to wool yarn (again, untreated except for the dye), and acrylic yarn.

As you can see, the cotton smoldered a bit, even when the flame was removed.  I had to tamp out the fire with my fingers.  The residue wiped right off the ceramic plate.

I had great difficulty getting the wool to burn at all, and once the flame was removed, it was no longer on fire.  Again, the residue wiped right off the plate.

But the acrylic…it needed only a little flame to start burning and then it burned until I put it out.  Not only that, the burnt residue was fused to the plate.  Without being too graphic, I’d like to point out that burning acrylic next to your skin would also fuse to your skin, greatly complicating burn treatment.

Okay, enough of that.  My point (and I do have one) is that wool is an amazing fiber, and useful in many ways.  One of the neat things you can do with wool is felt it (assuming it hasn’t been treated to resist felting).  I did a previous post on this but I thought it was worth revisiting.  You can knit or crochet wool and then throw it in the washing machine with the temperature set as high as it will go.  And it will come out felted.  I would caution you that if you are planning to do a lot of felting, you might want to confine your wooly pieces inside something like a pillowcase, lest too much stray fiber plug up your machine.

You can knit or crochet your item into its final shape and then shrink it down to size; I have done this with knitted hats and slippers. On the left are the French Press Felted Slippers and on the right is the Bowler Hat.

Or you can knit or crochet a flat piece of fabric, felt it down, then cut it down to size and alter its shape as needed.  I did this to make a cozy for my mother’s french press coffee maker, as she was unhappy about how fast the coffee got cold.  I assure you, this felted cozy kept the coffee piping hot!

And one of my former coworkers had a similar complaint about her ceramic coffee mug…the coffee just got cold too fast.  So I made this to fit her mug exactly. 

For today’s post, I just knit up some wool yarn from the felting stash into some garter stitch shapes.  The first was more or less square.  I felted it by running it through a hot water washing machine cycle and then the dryer.  Then I trimmed the edges to even them out.  Et voila!  Simple but very effective pot holder or trivet for your table. 

The second piece I knit up into a rectangle, folded the top edge over a bit and stitched it down (with more wool, of course).  Then I felted that, trimmed it a little bit, and then used more wool yarn to do a sort of overcast stitch on the folded over edges.  Hey presto!  Another pot holder, this one a little more like a mitt.  I confess, I wish I’d just knitted or crocheted the “seam” edges together before I felted it. That would have given me a nicer finish.

I was initially planning to perhaps give these away as a gift, but I like them so much that I’m keeping them.  Try making a little wool felt yourself…it’s wonderfully useful and versatile. Wool for the win!