block party!

Yesterday we ran a few errands, and one of the items that was picked up during said errands was a bottle of Eucalan. We stopped by a yarn shop that was nearish our errand destinations, and I apparently was the lucky winner, since this was their last bottle of the good stuff. (As a side note, as nice as the ladies were, I don’t think I will ever, ever go there again. Especially not alone. The store was tiny. There was no way I could have looked at things without feeling very claustrophobic, and very watched by the two employees standing in the store that was no bigger than my bedroom. I don’t like being watched while I look at yarn, which is the reason I stopped going to the closer yarn shop in my old city, because they were so nosy. I feel kind of guilty, but I know I find the other yarn shop I’ve been to here far more comfortable, because it is bigger and they left me alone to look at my leisure, so that’s the shop I’ll be frequenting in the future).

Anyway, we proceeded to give the scarf and the Rogue pieces a good bath once we got home. Alas, our apartment is, shall we say, not conducive to washing and blocking a sweater. The bathroom is ridiculously tiny, making for a very cramped place to wash woolens. The only room with a door that latches is the office, and the pieces of foamcore to which Rogue is pinned fill basically all of the open floorspace, but we don’t have much choice about it, because we have to put them in a room where the cats can’t get, since they are, much as I love them, horrible little wool-chewers. But enough babble, y’all want some pictures?

Here’s Rogue, pinned out onto foam pieces covered with towels. I stuffed the hood with a couple of sweatshirts so that it wouldn’t dry in a crumpled heap. Here’s a closeup of that:

It’s thrilling to me, to see how the yarn (Bartlett Yarn, in Lovat) blooms after its bath. I’d heard stories of this “blooming” thing, but have never gotten to witness it until now. It’s too bad that the lighting in our apartment is too terrible for any of that loveliness to show up in the picture. Here’s one last shot of Rogue, a close-up of the sleeve-cable:

I also gave Wyl’s scarf a bath, so that it would be a bit softer when I send it off to him. Here’s a shot of his scarf, drying, which looks shockingly like of the shot of it before the bath, only with a towel underneath (and with a very strange lighting effect from the camera which makes it look like the blue changes colors, which it doesn’t…it’s a nice solid dark royal blue throughout):

(that jacket in the corner? That’s my 2003 Boston Marathon jacket. I wish I were actually in marathon running shape still, but I’m not. It’s my goal for ’07, though, to run the Rochester marathon)

So now I’ve just got to let them dry. I’m afraid that’s going to take forever, what with how wet it’s been here lately, and the fact that the room they’re drying in doesn’t have very good ventilation (well, to be honest, no room in this apartment does, but this room is the stuffiest). Any tips? I’m somewhat terrified of setting in the sleeves on Rogue, just because I’ve never done it before, and I’m a far better knitter than sewer, so if anyone has any tips for doing that, I’d much appreciate those, too.