I’ve talked up my crafting friend Ivy in Get Your Pitchfork On!. She can make anything! She made a poppyseed cake covered with daisies when Mike and I celebrated our wedding in Portland. She lines up rocks and leaves on her tables and her walls. She doesn’t just make fruit jam, she adds things like cardamom and lemon rind. She has a special egg-scrambling technique, which I have documented but haven’t shared with you yet. In due time.
In May, Ivy and her friend Ria came out to visit. Ivy brought a special gift-project: wool mittens! She had knitted them already and wanted to felt them in our washing machine. It was funny to try on mittens on a brilliantly sunny and warm day.
They’re kind of big!
Wool mittens and lilacs–not usually in the same picture
Note to Wool-Felters: Don’t try to felt wool in a new washing machine!
Ivy’s usual method is to dump extra-hot water into the drum and add the unfelted mittens, then agitate until they have shrunk down to the desired size. We bought our washing machine last year, shortly after moving to Wallowa County. It has a computer. It sounds like a arcade machine when you turn it on. The lid locks while it’s running. This machine determines the size of the load by weighing it, and if there isn’t enough in there it won’t run. It wouldn’t run.
Ivy tried a couple different methods to fool the machine into shrinking our mittens. Eventually, she gave up, hauling four sopping, still-oversized mittens upstairs and hung them on the porch rail to dry. She brought them back to Portland and washed them in a dumber machine, and they came back to us just in time for cold weather!
I hope you all have such a gifted, crafty, and generous friend!
I ❤ Ivy
getyourpitchforkon 