Still Knitting

I haven't posted about knitting in a while.  We're still doing it.  DD2 not so much; it took her all of March to make her first pot holder, but I have to give her credit for even attempting it. It turned out well, especially being a basket weave pattern.  You see, in February DD2 had informed  the knitting instructor and I that she had absolutely no desire to do anything that required purling.  Then  in early March she found this pot holder in a 30 minute knits type of book, loved the design, and told the instructor that was what she wanted to make next!  So it was cast on, then knit four and purl four, reversing the pattern after every fourth row, all month for her.  She is proud of her new skill, and intends to make several more.  She gifted me with the first one.

DD1 has been slowly working on a pair of legwarmers.  She has one done, and is about to start the second one.

I, being an overachiever and a perfectionist, chose a much more ambitious project.  I decided that I wanted to make myself a wrap.  90 stitches wide and 64" long was the pattern I chose (saw it on Ravelry).  I learned to yarn over and to slip stitch while making this wrap.  It took many hours--just about every evening in the month of March--but I finished it up on Saturday.

It still needs to be blocked, and the shirt I wore while modeling the wrap really doesn't do it justice.

I used 2 skeins (437 yards each) of Cascade Heritage Paints yarn.  It is fingering weight, and 75% merino wool, knit on size 7 16" circular needles.  Not only was this a project I intended to increase my knitting skills, but it also an experiment.

You see, I have eczema, and I've always been told I cannot wear wool because it will aggravate my skin. The few times I have tried on wool socks, or shirts, or a wool blanket from the store, yes, it was irritating.  I was itching within minutes, and my skin showed red rashy spots.

Knowing what I know about conventionally grown foods versus homegrown foods, how the former can cause irritations in the body that the latter doesn't, I've wondered for over a decade now if it might be the same story for wool.  If it's conventionally made wool clothing I can't wear; if I could maybe wear wool clothing that was handmade/homemade.  If it might be the manufacturing process and it's chemicals, treatments, etc that were the irritants more than the actual wool fibers.  So I chose wool to make this wrap out of instead of cotton or acrylic.

What have I learned from this experiment?  Well, after a month of having my hands in this wool yarn for at least an hour nearly every day, and up to three hours on some days, my skin doesn't look any different.  It is not irritated, my eczema has not flared up.  It hasn't itched at all.  And the few times I've put on my wrap (while making it to check for length, and when it was done to show it off), the yarn has not irritated my bare arms either.  Only time and use will tell for sure, but at this point I'm thinking my hypothesis about the processing of the wool item being the determiner of how much the wool bothers my eczema is fairly accurate.