I've been working on a project with a luxury yarn at a fairly fine gauge and a couple of days ago I decided that I needed to make a change several inches back in the work. It wasn't an error so much as a design tweak. I needed to frog quite a few inches and re-knit a chunk of work, and I wanted to re-use the precious yarn. So, I bit the figurative bullet and did the unravelling. The only problem--the knitted work had been blocked. As I've blogged about before, I usually block work in progress to check on length and fit. So, the unraveled yarn was well and truly kinked.
What to do? I wound the unraveled yarn back into a skein using my swift, tying it loosely in a few places to keep it all together, then soaked (not agitated!) it in my washer and spun it dry. I hung it over a chair back to dry until it looked like this.
Much better. I'm going to re-wind the yarn into a ball and then I'll be ready to go. Of course, none of this would have been possible with a fibre like mohair, but with the blend of animal fibres I'm working with, it was not only possible, but well worth the effort.
