Dryer Ball Failure

Hello on a post-snowy Saturday!  I hope you're safe and well; we're good here.

It's been snowing here most of the week, and it's gotten to be very cold.  We weren't supposed to get much snow yesterday, but I think we actually got more snow yesterday than we'd gotten all week!  Oh well, such is life in this part of the country!

So I've been experimenting with making dryer balls lately.  My first round was using Icelandic roving, which is extremely loosely plied wool drawn into a narrow band for knitting.  It knits up surprisingly well and strong for something that seems so delicate, but the fiber length is such that is manages to hold together unless yanked from the hank.  I haven't tried to pull on the swatch I'd made for Girasole (but I did decide that I need a different yarn for that future project!).  

Anyway, I wound some into balls, stuffed them into the leg of a nylon stocking, tied each one off so that it looked like a strange caterpiller, and washed and dried it along with a couple of loads of laundry.  They came out brilliantly, solid, and gift-worthy.  I have a bunch of this roving, so I can continue merrily along.  Everyone in my life is going to get dryer balls this year, LOL.

In the meantime I thought I'd also try using regular roving.  I have a fair amount of just plain but lovely wool roving that I probably won't be using in the near future for anything (too many other spinning projects ahead of that!), so I wound some of that into balls, fluffing it up a bit along the way just so things were dispersed nicely and not lumpy.  Stockings, wash/dry, they came out brilliantly.

On a whim I grabbed a ball of handspun that I made so early on in my spinning journey that it's dyed with Kool-Aid (that was a fun experiment too!).  I rolled it into a ball and it followed along with the roving others.  Except when I took them all out of the stocking to free range in the dryer, this happened:

OK, so good to know.  Don't use this yarn to make dryer balls.  What's surprising is that it didn't even full much at all, even though I'm 98% sure it's got nothing in it but wool and Kool-Aid.  I did Navajo Ply it though (is it still proper to call it that?), so it's 3-ply and quite round.  Not surprisingly, the Kool-Aid didn't hold up that great.  What I really need to do is gather up the rest of these yarns (there are maybe three or four small bundles) and make them into mittens, that way they can get trashed and/or lost, as mittens do, and not have it be a heartbreaking event.  (Or perhaps I should over-dye them with proper dye first??)

In other knitting news - I don't have much other yarn stuff to report except that you'll see a couple of pairs of preemie mitts soon - probably the first ones in nearly a year, I'm guessing!  This past week was a very busy one with Cornell but I have to say I enjoyed every minute of it!

In wildlife news - with the snow come the animal tracks.  This morning we saw a very straight line of tracks in the snow leading directly up to a tree and then stopping.  So - either this was a squirrel running in a very straight line to the tree and then up the tree, or it was a physically manifested entity that became part of the tree when it got there, or the tree somehow tiptoed over to the driveway and then back again.  You decide which is the most probable!