Friday, November 29, 2019

Penelopes Thanksgiving visit and a moth hole repair plan



Penelope arrived in a donkey cart for Thanksgiving dinner. Her Mother had prepared a very traditional pixie meal of boiled acorn pudding, wild hazelnut cake, dried persimmon snacks, and a mixed greens and mushroom gratin.


Everyone helped clean up after dinner and had a wonderful time laughing and talking.


Penelope showed off the repairs on her angora and lambs wool sweater as she packed up her "gatherings" to take back to her village. The sweater was hand spun on the spindolyn and knitted on size 2.5 needles.


Pixies always exchange things every time they go for a visit, after all, if you can't share, it just isn't as fun! Here Penelope is loading up sweet gum balls. They still contain viable seeds that can be planted back in village to grow sweet gum trees for medicines. You can see some of the tiny seeds that have fallen out onto the wooden table.

This weeks plan: repairing knitting with moth holes with needle felting

When I dug Penelope out of a suitcase where she had been resting for the last 20 odd years, I discovered that her white angora sweater with blue lambswool sleeves and trim had moth holes all in the angora portion, but the blue lambswool was just fine.

Now some people would have thought this was sad, but I thought; Great, a perfect opportunity for me to test some ideas I had for repairs on moth holes. I have a great need for this, because I wear wool sweaters all winter, and they fall into three categories; moth riddled sweaters for farm and wood shop work, soft and semi worn sweaters for in the house, and pretty nice "go in to town sweaters".
 Even though they are just work sweaters, I didn't want to try any new to me techniques on the holey ones, and possibly make them worse, because I still value them.

Working on Penelope's sweater I learned that you can just lay wool over the holes and start jabbing, but you will end up shrinking and drawing it up as you work, which could make your sweater pucker, which was great for her sweater anyway, as it was a bit oversized. So on my work sweaters, I am going to felt patches off of the sweater on the felting rice bag, make the edges all tidy, and blanket stitch them on as actual "patches" on to the sweater.

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