Love it!

Some may remember my finished big project last year of my Cascade Lizard Ridge blanket. Found out in the Lizard Ridge class that I must be allergic to the vm or dyes in the Noro Kureyon so switched to Cascade 220 and had the balls in a bag and would randomly draw. I seemed to have gotten a lot of yellow. ;-)

It's been a great blanket to snuggle up through last winter and with the cooler days of fall starting I was snuggled up under it one morning recently. There was also a cup of coffee involved. Can you guess? Yes, there was spillage that happened. 

The blanket has been hanging out on the back of the couch during this last year too. Norbert favors it and the flannel quilt that I sewed a couple of years ago to lay on top of. Those diamonds were tricky to line up and there might have been some swearing involved since it was Brandon's idea.

Anyway, one of the other things that happened last year is, to say thank you to Brandon for all the computer help that he's done, his grandfather took us out and bought us a new washer and dryer set. A nice huge capacity front loader and dryer - Maytag Epics, if you're curious. I hadn't had time to do the research so I was going in blind and went with size, energy rating and known name brand.

I've used the dryer to help dry fiber and handspun yarn - it came with a dryer tray so the stuff can lay on the tray and have all the heat and none of the agitation that causes felting. Love it!

With the Lizard Ridge Blanket and the coffee spill it was the first time I was able to use a washer setting - Wool. I first fixed some of the snags, darn dog nails grabbing strands and pulling, then popped it into the washer with a smidgen of detergent, then walked away. I didn't want to watch - chicken I know. ;-)

Twenty minutes later I came back to get the washed blanket - looked awesome! A clean and bright again. Then I looked at this wet wool blanket and was so not going to go through the air dry process. So looked at the dryer to see what it could offer me. There's a 'delicate' cycle but there's also a 'super delicate' cycle. Score! In went the blanket and it did take two times through the super delicate cycle for the blanket to get dry, but it didn't felt at all! Love it!

See! No felting. The boobies came back too.  Oh come on, if you've seen one in progress the short row sections end up looking like boob bumps. (They were blocked out for sewing them up.) So the only drawback to the new set is the whole felting process. Frontends are not inclined to let you open the door in the middle of a cycle, all that water whooshing out. So felting things is interesting but I'm not a huge felter so not a HUGE loss. The old top loader was given to the BIL since they were going through a lot of laundry with two small kids in the house.