5 Magic Awesome Reasons to Sew With Wool! (+ 2 Ways to Wash It)

Wool: sexy, hypnotic and magical! Don't be scared!

So last night I was leisurely handwashing the soft, blue and luscious Christian Dior doubleknit wool fabric I'm using for my Mad Men Challenge dress in a basin of tepid water and Eucalan...

And as I squeezed it very gently with my hands, that delicious lanolin smell wafted up to my nostrils and I thought: "Wow! I can't believe I ever was afraid of wool!"

In fact, before I started knitting with better-quality soft merino wools (thanks to the inspiring words of Elizabeth Zimmerman and The Yarn Harlot), I not only feared handwashing wool garments, I thought I was actually allergic to the stuff.* I even sought out acrylic and cotton yarns OVER wool. For real!

So in case you are still struggling with wool-o-phobia, I present (in random, arbitrary, unscientific fashion):

5 Reasons I Love Working With Wool

1. It keeps you warm but lets your skin breathe.
2. It resists odors, stains and bacteria, and rarely needs cleaning.
3. Wool kicks water to the curb and keeps you toasty and dry, absorbing up to 30 percent of its weight in water before even feeling wet. This is why I wear wool socks almost every day (except in the summer).
   
4. It comes in gazillions of beautiful colors and weights and styles to suit any taste. Slinky sexy soft merino wool jerseys, nubbly gorgeous sturdy tweeds and plaids, thin tropical wools, flattering drapey crepes...
5. It has amazing springiness and recovery and takes fabulously to pressing and steaming and shaping and fitting and tailoring (see Joan photo at top--do you think cotton can do that? I don't think so!)

Bonus Reasons For Crafty Mamas to Love Wool

1. Wool makes baby pee vanish. Like magic! Wool diaper soakers make the best cloth diaper covers because the lanolin in the wool does some weird tricky thing that actually just makes the urine go away as it dries. Really! (Not that I'm going to let Z pee on my Mad Men dress, mind you.) When Z was a newborn, I used the awesome and quick Sheepy Soaker pattern to make the below:
   
2. Wool fights embarrassing breastmilk leaks. I ONLY wear merino wool nursing pads (which I could have made easily, but bought--mine are LanaCare and OnGuard brands). I have a few pairs, and one dries while the other is in use. They are soft, warm, absorbent and dry, fight bacteria and don't feel cold and clammy, and can be easily handwashed as necessary.

2 Ways to Wash Wool

1. Handwash with gentle wool wash and tepid water. I use this method for all handknits and all my wool sweaters and wool knit tops. It's SO easy. Seriously. Just: fill a basin with tepid water, add a dash of wool wash (the real gentle lanolin-containing kind, like Eucalan, not Woolite or any harsh chemical ones) gently squeeze through, let soak 15 minutes, roll gently in a towel to remove excess water, lay flat to dry. DONE. No rinsing required!
2. Pam's Dry-Clean-free Fast & Easy pre-treatment method. I haven't tried this yet, but many sewists swear by it, and I love that no dry cleaner is required! Though I'm not clear on whether occasional dry-cleaning would still be required once a garment is actually worn--my guess is yes.

And as they used to say on Reading Rainbow, don't just take my word for it!

Nothing beats wool. It's an extraordinary material—annually renewable and recyclable—with infinite potential. It can be wispy and sensual when it wants to be, it can be gruff and powerful, it can put out fires and keep families warm at night, it can be stepped on, sat under, rained on, and wrapped up in again and again.
--Clara Parkes, author of The Knitter's Book of Wool

So: do you fear--or embrace--wool? And why? What's your favorite source for buying wool fabric?

*Mohair, on the other hand--that stuff turns my skin bright red in SECONDS. Yowch!

A Sewing Room of My Own! (Sort of)

Or dimly lit corner of the nursery of my own, anyway. Viking machine + Horn cabinet + IKEA chair found in basement trash room.

Are you one of those lucky sewists with a whole room dedicated to your crafty pursuits? With a sewing cabinet and a serger station and a cutting table and an inspiration wall and a fabric storage closet and a pattern storage cabinet and a dress form corner and a gravity-fed steam iron and ...

OK, I hate you. Or envy you, anyway. But not as much as I used to, because I FINALLY have a permanent spot for the sewing machine. No more hiding my beloved Viking Platinum 730 in a corner cabinet under a pile of breast-pump paraphernalia! No more lifting stacks of this and piles of that and clearing off the dining table before I can sew a single seam. OK, so my serger is still on a closet shelf and I still cut fabric on a cardboard mat on the bed, but... baby steps!

This was part of some serious apartment rearranging and decluttering. We put the crib in our bedroom next to the bed for easy baby access, replacing the cosleeper she outgrew way too fast. We even threw out our coffee table. It was just collecting magazines anyway, and now there's a nice big spot on the living room rug to put down quilts for playtime:

Patchwork baby quilt by my amazing mom, knitted purple diaper soaker by yours truly, and drool by Miss Baby Z.

So far my mother's been doing the lion share of the sewing (baby diapers, baby hats, a cloth book) but I actually made Z a few things for the holidays and maybe I'll even make myself some clothes soon. I also have finally learned to backwrap, so maybe Z can take a snooze back there while I sew and not be able to reach for any pins or sharp stuff. Here we are at a babywearing holiday party:

So yeah, more posts and actual finished sewn objects for you soon!

How about you? Do you have a drool-worthy permanent sewing setup... or do you have to tug your machine out of the bottom of a closet out from under a pile of old shoes and heave it onto a coffee table every time you get stitchy?

P.S. Apologies for dim lighting, but there's so few hours of daylight for blog photos in the dead of winter!

P.P.S. OK, I replaced the dimly lit photo with a better shot and added a few more details.

There's Nothing Like Handmade

As I'm sure you'll agree, there's nothing like a handmade gift. I've mostly been featuring handmade items made for Baby Z by me or my amazing mom, but our friends and family have been generous with their knitting needles and sewing machines as well!

The above sweater and hat set is a gift to Baby Z from her Great Aunt Becky. There's a story behind the little bears labeled "Maine Doggies"--when I was a toddler, I used to visit my grandparents on their farm in Maine. One day I was walking with my grandmother Melba and saw a bear--I thought it was a big dog and wanted to go over and pet it.

My Aunt Becky also made her this stranded hat and mitten set:

And here's Z a few weeks ago in a diaper soaker knit by our friend Sonia, lying on a gorgeous patchwork baby quilt made by my department head Debbie (note the ballet shoes in the quilting pattern):

Speaking of diaper soakers, Z's already grown out of the smallest one I knit for her, the Green Goblin soaker. Here she is in the soaker her first week home, when she was just over 8 pounds...

And here she is in that same soaker a month ago, at 5 weeks old:

Now at 2 1/2 months old and 13 pounds, she's outgrown many of her 3 month clothes and is mostly in 6 month sizes. And her feet barely fit in the booties I knit for her that I thought were so huge:

Knitting and sewing aren't the only crafts in town, of course. My mother-in-law Gail makes beautiful handmade soaps and jewelry that she sells at conventions and fairs, and she put together these gift bags for Z's baby shower in March. She made the soaps and magnets, and Masheka's cousin Laurie made the lollipops (I've whited Z's name out in PhotoShop for her privacy.) You'll note the soap features a mold of a pregnant woman.

Z is a Punk Rocker...

Punk Rock Baby Z, originally uploaded by M1khaela.

She even wears flame-patterned diapers, sewn by her Grandmommy Beryl:

Also, how cool is her natural curly faux-hawk? (Fro-hawk?) It just grows like that--big and curly down the middle and thin on the sides.

More posts coming soon--at six weeks post-partum, I'm even starting to think about maybe possibly someday breaking out my sewing machine again for a quick project here or there (though I'm still basically nursing her every hour when she's awake). Baby girl is growing so fast I should even be able to photograph her in the 6-month stuff I made for her in a week or two (the above onesie was purchased, not me-made).

When bold color combinations go wrong...

I'm still here, and still (hugely) pregnant--I'm officially full term now, at 37 weeks! But apparently along with my sense of balance, I have also lost my keen sense of color combination.

See Exhibit A, above. After I totally misread the instructions on my last Sheepy Soaker and ended up with a diaper cover that is sure to extend up to Cartoonist Baby's adorable little armpits, I made this stripey number.

It seemed like a good idea at the time. After all, I love stripes...

Stripe Love by m1khaela featuring Anthropologie

And I love combining purple and green...

But as I was blithely knitting away, Cartoonist Husband pointed out that somehow, this particular purple and this particular green, in this particular striped configuration couldn't help but remind him of a certain Spiderman villain:

Oh well. Green-Goblinesque or no, it'll still keep her adorable little butt dry, and it's still way cuter than any disposable diapers. Here's a back view:

P.S. How about you, readers? Do you have any stories of promising color combinations gone wrong?

P.P.S. I just thought of another one, actually, also pointed out by Cartoonist Husband. Back in January I made a sweatshirt for a serger class, and I thought it might be cute to make it in red french terry with black ribbed edging. The unflattering 80s unisex pattern didn't fit at all. So I spent way too much time trying to alter it for maternity, but never got around to reattaching the second sleeve...

Mostly thanks to an unfortunate resemblance to a certain doomed class of Star Trek character:

Finished: My Purple Sheepy Soaker Wool Diaper Cover!

Exhausted, pregnant and laid up in bed as I have been lately, I needed a quick little creative project that did not involve being hunched over a sewing machine or cutting table. So after my successful yarn de-stashing, I examined what I had held onto and decided to make some small, easy baby things.

I started out trying to make Elizabeth Zimmerman's lacy little Baby Sweater on Two Needles from Knitter's Almanac, with some superwash yarn I hand-dyed in 2008:

... but I found I was too darn tired to deal with even such a simple lace pattern. I knit the yoke no problem, but after knitting and ripping back the first few rows of lace four or five times I realized I needed something more mindless.

Enter the Sheepy Soaker! I had always been puzzled as to all the wool diaper covers I saw on my favorite knitting blogs, cute and ruffly as they were--why wool? Wouldn't it leak? Wouldn't it be hot and itchy for babies?

No, no and no! I mentioned before that one of the many baby-prep classes Masheka and I took was a free cloth diapering workshop (for those of you in NYC, it was at Metro Minis--they hold it twice a month and I HIGHLY recommend it). We already had more than 67 home-sewn cloth diapers of various sizes in our diaper stash thanks to my amazing mom:

IMG_6350, originally uploaded by beryldrue.

...but we needed a little Cloth Diapering 101. We wanted to get a sense of cloth diapering as a whole, what types are out there, how to properly wash them (especially since we live in an apartment building with shared laundry in the basement), how to deal with them while out and about, etc.

Many of the newer diapers (including quite a few of the ones my mom made, like the blue one in the above photo) are all-in-ones. With an absorbent lining sewn inside a waterproof outer layer made of PUL or the like, they're as easy to use as disposables (aside from the extra laundry).

And then there are diapers made of absorbent materials like cotton, hemp or flannel--they could be foldeds, prefolds, fitted or contour style, but they all need an additional waterproof cover. Said cover could be made from PUL, fleece, nylon--or wool!

Apparently, wool diaper covers (often known as "soakers" or "longies" if they're pants-length) are the king of cloth diaper covers. The class instructor could NOT say enough good things about them. Unlike synthetic materials, they're breathable, and actually a great choice for summer-time diapering. In its natural state, wool is waterproof thanks to the lanolin from the sheep, but it can also be regularly re-lanolized (using Lansinoh cream, even). Weirdest of all, it requires infrequent washing, because when baby urine meets lanolin, it produces some kind of chemical reaction that neutralizes the pee and turns it into soap.

Great, right? But commercially-available wool diaper soakers are mad expensive, often starting at $35 each or more. Even with a soft merino wool yarn like Malabrigo, I figured I could make the same thing with about $6 worth of yarn... already handily available in my stash!

Anyway, here are the details on my first soaker attempt (we'll say "attempt" until I try it out in the field):

• Pattern: The Sheepy Soaker, available as a download for $5.75 from Sheepy Time Knits. It's an extremely detailed but easy pattern with 16 pages of photos and instructions for soakers in a variety of sizes and styles. It's knit in the round with no short rows (just some ribbing and a gusset).
• Sizing: I skipped the newborn size and made a small for maximum versatility. I think I may have made it a bit too deep in length, but we'll see. (Update: I emailed with the pattern designer and I did indeed misinterpret her pattern instructions--it's about 1.5" too deep, so I'll have to come up with a fix).
• Yarn: Malabrigo worsted merino in "polygala" (purple). SOOO soft!
• Needles: The pattern recommends a gauge of 5 stitches to the inch, which I got using size 6 needles. I used size 4 for the ribbing on the waist and legs.

Here's a back view:

I've also made the project details viewable on Ravelry, even if you're not a member.

P.S. For you non-knitting sewing moms out there, you can also sew wool diaper covers from old sweaters!

P.P.S. If you're wondering what the answer was regarding washing the cloth diapers--while baby is exclusively breastfed, you just throw them in a diaper pail and every few days you wash them once in cold water, once in hot water (using a diaper-appropriate detergent), and then dry. If baby is getting formula or solid foods, you have to shake the solids into the toilet first (or rinse them out with a diaper sprayer or the like) before washing.

67 cloth diapers and counting... With flames!

IMG_6350, originally uploaded by beryldrue.

Seriously. My mom and her sewing machine are OUT OF CONTROL. Cartoonist Baby is going to have the best-attired butt ever.

Click the photo to read how she made them--she used all kinds of fancy specialty fabrics that will keep leakage to a minimum.