one WIP, one FO

Remember the sweater with puppy dog buttons?

I finished it this weekend! It desperately needs blocking, though, so no FO pictures yet. Maybe later this week. Hey, the kid's not even born yet, so I'm ahead of the game on this one!!

Since I finished one project, I felt completely justified in casting on for another.

I present: CLAPETTE.

(Thanks for the name, Maryse. Way to put those French language skills to work!)

She's a mini-version of the infinitely popular Clapotis. Using purls for the stitches to be dropped, rather than knit stitches and stitch markers.

She's knit with my very own handspun, spun with this pattern in mind.

Have I mentioned that I love this yarn?

And, because inquiring minds want to know, here's how I wet-finished the yarn.

1. Tie each of the two skeins in eight places, using figure-8 ties.
2. Drape yarn in strategic locations all over the house for most of a week.
3. Right before leaving for a trip to the in-laws, decide that wet-finishing must happen NOW.
4. Fill a very large bowl with very cold water.
5. Fill the bathroom sink with the hottest possible tap water and a squirt of Soak, and let the yarn sit for 20 minutes.
6. Drain sink and squeeze out yarn.
7. Dunk in cold water, agitate with hands.
8. Return to sink, and fill with fresh hot tap water. Agitate with hands, squealing because the water is HOT! (Yeah, I know you can use a small sink plunger, but remember, I wanted to do this NOW and I didn't have a clean plunger.)
   
9. Squeeze out hot water, dunk in cold for another minute or so.
10. Repeat hot water/cold water cycle once more, and then one more hot cycle (that's 3 hots, not including the initial soak).
11. Drain sink, squeeze out as much water as possible from the skeins.
12. Roll in a beach towel and stomp aggressively to get rid of more water.
13. Lay the towel on the kitchen floor. Whack each end of the skein against the towel a couple of times.
14. Hang yarn to dry. I put coat hangers on the ends of the skeins, and draped a towel over the coat hangers for some extra weight. This probably wasn't necessary.

I'll try to get a good closeup of the finished yarn. The finishing did what you would expect -- the yarn fluffed out a little bit, and the plies became more integrated. The separate strands of yarn were fuzzed together like weak velcro as I was winding it off, but there was no felting.

I spun the yarn with a mostly worsted style, from a worsted prep roving. So, the wet-finishing probably didn't change the character of the yarn that much. In fact, I probably could have just soaked the skein and hung it to dry and called it a day. But, I had fun trying something new!