I mentioned a couple of posts ago that I had been given some yarn that a friend acquired from Freecyle. Some of this was knitted up into fancy pieces that had clearly been destined to become a number of blankets, but the knitter had abandoned the project. I’m not fond of frogging* my own work, but someone else’s is a different matter.

So, I started with a heap of knitted pieces, some of which were stitched together:

I separated them into individual pieces and then frogged them all, so that I ended up with lots of small balls of wool and scraps:

The scraps will be used for stuffing, but the balls had to be sorted into groups of the same yarn, gauge and colour:

The problem with yarn that has previously been knitted is that it has ‘memory, and so it tends to be kinky! Some fibres have better memory than others, so some retain their waviness more strongly. Rolling the yarn into balls helps to resolve the problem and is enough for some fibres, like acrylic, but wool is particularly tenacious and requires more processing to persuade it to forget its previous form. The simplest way to deal with this is to wash it, so next I combined each wool type and colour into hanks, which I then soaked in warm water with a little gentle detergent designed for wool (I use one from Sonett made from olive oil):

I then hung the hanks up to dry and waited to see if this was enough.

Interestingly, this worked fine for most colours, but the reds and pink remained quite wavy. So, I resoaked them overnight and hung them up, but this time weighted down gently:

They still didn’t end up completely straight, but were good enough for hexipuffs. All the hanks, once dry, were wound back into balls ready for knitting with:

In fact, the acrylic had so little memory (it is clearly the goldfish of the yarn world) that just rolling it into balls straightened it out. I, therefore, decided to leave it at this and wash it once it had been turned into finished products, in this case mainly eco bath puffs, pictured here with a couple of hexipuffs made from the straightened wool:

It all sounds like a bit of a rigmarole, but the whole process was very enjoyable (especially the frogging, despite being unable to get the Frog Chorus out of my head for the whole time) and I’m really delighted that I have gained some yarn for nothing more than a bit of time and have prevented something else going to landfill.

-oOo-

*Hang on, I hear you saying, what on earth is frogging? Well, for those of you who are not fans of Ravelry (the knitter’s favorite web resource), it’s unravelling a piece of knitting. Huh? Well, because you rip it, rip it, rip it…