Outside

Remember last year?
Well, this year winter took some time (yeah, like when we were having coffee outside in the sun around Christmas), but it finally has arrived!


This is the first snow in 2007 for Munich and the forecast says more snow tonight and tomorrow. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that they're right, we've had a spring-like winter for way too long now. Yay for snow! And it's finally cold, so time to wear some nice knitwear! This season I've bought quite a few nice woolen sweaters, and for the first time in my life I've ruined one of them. Yes, I know, I'm a knitter, I should have known better... but I was using wool detergent! To tell you the whole story: I washed a pillow (not the case, the whole thing) the other day and as there was some room left in the machine I put a few more things in. One of them was my favorite sweater, a perfect blueish-greenish-turquoise 100% woolen v-neck, and I thought the easy-to-clean-cycle wouldn't hurt. Well, I changed my mind when I took everything out of the machine.

The sweater had shrunk (and no pulling into shape would help) AND felted even though the temperature had only been 30°C! (that's 86°F) That's not even body temperature, so I thought it was safe as I had washed other woolen items at that temperature before (in the wool wash cycle though - where everything came out just fine). I guess that's my piece of advice for today: always wash woolen stuff in the wool wash cycle, just wool detergent on another cycle isn't doing the job. Unless you have a giant sweater at home that you'd like to felt, or you want to shrink some jumpers so your kids can wear them. Those kids would have to be quite skinny though.