Generally once a week I’ll fill up my bathroom sink and hand wash a few things like a sweater and a couple bras.  I love using Soak for this because it’s so easy: just fill up the sink, pour in a cap-full of Soak and let the sweater soak for at least 15 minutes.  (Sometimes my things have soaked for hours with no problems!) Before I remove my garment from the sink, I carefully swish it around and the dirt gets released.  No rinsing required!

So when I found myself with a big pile of sweaters to wash, I adapted my soaking method to my top-loading washing machine.  I fill up the machine with cool water and then turn it off.  3 cap-fulls of Soak are good for a medium sized load, but I just usually eyeball it and squirt a little in.  As long as the sweaters get full submerged, the Soak will do the trick.  After 30 minutes or so of soaking, I again carefully swish everything around and then advance my machine to the spin cycle.  I love using the machine to get the water out, it makes for such a quick drying time!  After all the water has spun out, I usually lay all my sweaters flat to dry on a towel in an out of the way place.  (A spare bed would be great for this!) This last time the things I was washing weren’t too fragile, so I risked it and dried them with the air fluff setting of my dryer.  They came out great!

I think Soak is an especially good gift to give if you’ve made someone something that requires hand washing.  Using Soak takes barely any more time than regular machine washing and it makes your stuff smell so good too!

[soak]

PS: The most important thing when washing wool/handwash items is that they don’t get agitated.  Make sure your machine can’t advance to the wash cycle as your garments are soaking.  I leave the lid up so this can’t happen, but turning off the machine is the best way to ensure this.  Happy washing!

I’ve got to say that when we found out Blue Sky Alpacas was coming out with a new line of machine washable yarns, we ordered the whole line sight-unseen. And we haven’t regretted a skein of it. (As if Blue Sky could ever go wrong.) Spud & Chloe has three kinds of yarn: Sweater, Fine and Outer.  I’ve been most intrigued by the Outer because it’s so hard to find a machine washable super bulky yarn.  Plus, who could pass up the squishy, softness of superwash wool/organic cotton?

So when one of our customers was in on Saturday and pointed out this pattern in the current issue of Knitty, I was so excited!  I took some yarn home with me that night and two hours later had this hat!  I love it!

[Spud & Chloe yarn] [pattern]

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