Mystery gifts: In-law Edition

Today you get two (two!) for the price of one! This post should have gone up Wednesday, but the power went out and kind of messed up that plan. But the extra day of waiting didn’t kill you, did it?

So, the next two mystery photos were this:

And this:

The first photo is of wool dryer balls that I made for my mother-in-law.

Put them in the dryer instead of dryer sheets to cut static electricity without any questionable chemicals. Bonus! I’ve been using a set that I received in a craft swap a year ago and I love them. My mother-in-law lives in Spokane which has a fairly dry mountain climate. She tries to avoid having to use dryer sheets, so doing laundry there can get awfully prickly. I thought these might help her out. They aren’t too difficult to make, but they do take some time.

First, wind a small core of wool yarn into a grape-sized ball. Then, put the little balls into an old nylon and knot the top and throw them into a load of wash, preferably hot water.

All ready to go in the washer

The balls need to move around enough to mat and felt the wool, but you still want to keep them contained so that they don’t come unwound. After running through the washer, throw them into the dryer with the clothes to continue felting.

Core wool ball

From here, you could continue wrapping yarn, or save a little time and wrap the core ball in a bit of wool sweater like I did.

Run it through the wash again in the nylon. Then keep wrapping with yarn and felting it up to the size you like. The balls I made were about the size of a tennis ball by the time they were done. It’s not an exciting process, but wrapping the yarn balls is actually kind of therapeutic.

You can see the separate strands of yarn, but they won't come apart now.

Next up is my sister-in-law’s gift. She had asked for something warm in the way of an afghan, hat or scarf. I didn’t have time to whip out an afghan, so I decided to make the most of her hat/scarf request and made a hooded scarf.

Bulky yarn hooded scarf

I actually had to unwrap the scarf to take a photo of it because some overzealous wrappers had already gotten a hold of it. Mr. Gren was downstairs, chomping at the bit to get to the post office, so I had Granota take a quick photo of me modeling it.

You get the idea.

What can I say? She’s four.

Here’s hoping it provides my sis-in-law many warm outings this winter.

That’s the end of all the mystery gifts! We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled program next week. In other words, next week will be full of other random and seemingly unconnected projects, just like always. I completed another blouse for myself the week before Christmas; finished knitting a sweater this afternoon that now needs to be sewn together; I’ve begun a multi-colored block afghan to use up a bunch of Red Heart yarn that I’ve had forever, and who knows what else I’ll pick up in between.