Eskimimi Knits knitting blog

Surprise post is always the most lovely post – unless it is a surprise bill, in which case it is the most unlovely post, but bills were thankfully absent yesterday when a small but sweetly scented unexpected package arrived in the careful hands of my postman.

Inside was a ball of wool, some beautiful handmade soap, and this:

Kool Aid Rainbow

Now – most people would think that this was a gift of powdered soft drink sachets – thoughtful and fun. But as there is a good chance that most readers of this blog are interested in playing with yarn a good deal of you will be thinking ‘oh – dye stuffs!’, for yes, this humble powdered beverage contains enough colourant to take that undyed yarn and turn it into something far more arresting.  Permanently.

To dye yarn you need four main things: colour, water, heat and acid.  Acid? yes, but it’s not as scary as it sounds – most of the time this will be in the form of white vinegar, but when you are dyeing with Kool Aid the smell of white vinegar burning up your nostrils is thankfully avoidable, as those brightly coloured powders also contain enough acid to start a mid-80s music scene.

So with the addition of some waiting yarn (and I have some un-dyed handspun of my own just waiting to receive a nice colour treatment) I have a dyeing session awaiting me next week.  Thankyou SO MUCH for this surprise package, friendly sender.

What came first, the woolly or the mammoth?  Did these magnificent prehistoric pachyderms evolve or were they created… by knitters?  Here are two of my favourite things – knitting and natural history, in one T-shirt, designed by Eskimimi for Mr Cloud.

knitted woolly mammoth t-shirt from www.mrcloud.com

With knitting needles for tusks and a warm and cuddly knitted body, this mammoth really is woolly.  In this t shirt the mammoth is caught at the moment of casting on a new project  perhaps another mammoth in a previously unknown form of reproduction.  Could this have been why these wonderful animals eventually died out – because they couldn’t knit new mammoths fast enough?  Help to make sure that knitting never dies out again by making sure that we never forgot the fate of the woolly mammoths, and give fellow knitters and science nerds alike a smile for only £12.99, and available to ship worldwide from www.mrcloud.com

He's not just woolly, he's knitted. Oh, and he has buttons for eyes!

A digital weighing scale is a handy thing to have in your knitting kit.  Most digital kitchen scales that work in 1g increments will suffice for the needs of most knitters.  I actually have a small digital jewellery scale that works in increments of 1/10th of a gram, but I have had them for many years and long before I started knitting.  They are, however, very handy as they are only 4×6″ in size and fit easily into my knitting bag.

5.9g precisely, madam.

Digital scales are inexpensive, and (if you have a set that you can also use in the kitchen) great for making cakes.  A digital weighing scale is indispensable when making a pair of socks or mittens from a single skein of yarn.  The popular Baktus scarf (which I am currently in the process of blocking) requires you to cast on only a few stitches, slowly increase along one edge until you have knit exactly half of your yarn, and then decrease along the same edge until you are back to your original cast on number of stitches and out of yarn.  It’s a fantastic pattern for getting the most out of a single ball of yarn with no waste at the end, but guesswork as to when you have reached the halfway point of your ball of yarn could lead to tears and naughty words.

You can pick up a pair of digital jewellery scales for about £7-8 on eBay, and you can find digital kitchen scales in any shop that sells kitchen equipment. If you want to test the kitchen scales out by making a cake, please feel free to send any baked goods to me and my cake-trained palette will be happy to tell you if your scales have resulted in baking success.

Do you have any of Cascade’s Rustic yarn in your stash?  Or a sweater made of Harrisville Flax & Wool blend, perhaps?

wool and linen blend yarn

Wool (well known for it’s warmth and comfort) and linen (made from the fibres of the flax plant, and valued for its crispness and coolness) are a popular blend of fibres for suits and trousers, and are combined in a number of gorgeous hand knitting yarns, yet there are some people who believe these to be a forbidden mixture of fibres, warned against in religious scripture.

I found this out quite by chance, mentioned as an aside in Stephen Law’s The Philosophy Gym, but it’s something that stuck with me, and a subject that I have been quasi-researching in my spare moments for the past couple of weeks.  I’ll be straight up and tell you I am not religious, but the teachings (and particularly the history) of various religions hold endless fascination for me.  If you mix that together with a  healthy dose of yarn-talk, then I am all ears.

So, what do these religious texts actually say?

…neither shall a garment mingled of linen and woollen come upon thee. (Leviticus 19:19)

What most interests me is how this instruction came about. If I had to make my own judgement on what this instruction was for, I’d have guessed that it was a warning to keep the purity of different species and forms, because the entire verse reads:

Ye shall keep my statutes. Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind: thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed: neither shall a garment mingled of linen and woollen come upon thee. (Leviticus 19:19)

So, don’t mix species of animals, fields of crops, or types of fibre – keep them all separate.

Deciding to hit up Google for a few answers, though, I soon discovered that this is not necessarily the assumed reason. The first search engine result I hit upon had the following dialogue:
Q: ‘Why shouldn’t we wear wool and linen together’
A: ‘Electrocution’.
Simply stated, but not particularly satisfying as an answer. No explanation was given as to why a garment of mixed wool and linen fibres might lead to electrocution, just that it would. Back to the google-a-tron!
Soon, I came across this far more comprehensive explanation from Brian Sass:

If you were to wear a garment mixed with linen and wool in a hot climate, the first thing you would notice is an increasing tiredness as your energy gets zapped, then your internal organs would begin to fail as the electricity needed to run their various functions is depleted. As the energy passes from your body and meets with the hot air your skin will start to excoriate like a blister, causing rapid fluid loss and dehydration. The pain and discomfort would become unbearable and you would long for death to quickly come. Your wish is eventually granted.

Scary stuff, and Brain Sass uses the appliance of science to explain further:

You can measure the electricity in the human body in an electrical measurement called angstroms. The human body is quite healthy with 100 angstroms of electricity, if the electricity falls to 50 angstroms sickness begins to occur – if the decline continues to drop to 15 angstroms – more critical diseases such as cancer will occur. Wearing a linen garment will boost the electricity in the human body to 5000 angstroms! keeping you very healthy and full of energy- it’s no wonder that God had his priests wearing linen garments in His service.

Wool on the other hand will also boost the body’s electricity to 5000 angstroms but with an opposite polarity. This is not harmful unless you mix the two, in which case, being of opposite polarity they cancel each other out and the bodies electricity drops to “0″ causing the symptoms outlined above.

Despite the scientific explanation that Brain Sass offers, I do not find it credible that these two fibres will cause you break out in blisters and develop cancer, otherwise clothes manufacturers around the world would have lawsuits coming out of their ears by now.

The real reason, to me, is still a mystery. This extremely interesting account and explanation of why wearing ’shatnez’(mixed linen and wool fibres) is forbidden is Judaism, and the practicalities of shatnez in modern life offers some understanding of the history of the rule:

…the Law of shatnez is a chok, a decree that the King has passed for His subjects, for which we do not know the reason.

^{(italics mine).}

So, at the moment I am not much the wiser as the historical significance of these passages but I find it an interesting concept none the less. If anyone has any more information about the ruling against mixing wool and linen in a single garment, that exists in a number of religions, I’d be extremely interested in hearing from you. Similarly, if anyone has any wool/linen mix yarn that they are now too scared to use, I will gladly take donations and put the risk wholly onto myself.
I especially like the colour green.