"Frozen" is not the same as "dry"

It has been really cold in Tennessee for the past few days. And I mean legitimately cold, not just what passes for "cold" here in the south (which for some people, consists of any temperature below 60). It has been just above freezing during the day, and well below at night. Sometimes with wind. BRRRRRRRR.

Today the low temps were accompanied by grey and damp (delightful!), but yesterday, it was really sunny. Cold, but sunny. And since I was at home with laundry to do, I figured I would hang it out on my lovely new-ish clothesline to dry.

Oh, yeah--did I mention that I have a clothesline? My dad built and erected it when my parents were here at Thanksgiving, and it is great! Here are some pictures of the work in progress (when it was only slightly warmer out that it has been this week):




About a week after Thanksgiving, when the concrete had time to set, I threaded the clothesline through and voila! I haven't used it a whole lot yet, mainly because I am only one person and can get away with only doing laundry every 3-4 weeks or so (yes, I have a lot of underwear).

So anyway, back to yesterday. I hung the clothes out in the sunny sunshine, figuring they should have enough time to dry by the time the sun went down. WRONG. Maybe if I had washed and hung them first thing in the morning, that would have worked. With just over two hours on the line, what they were when I took them down was not so much "dry" as "frozen."

To be fair, it's not like they were stiff or anything. I mean, they were *mostly* dry. I threw the machine-dryables in for about 20 minutes and they were fine--those I hung up in the bathroom were ready to come down by this morning.

Still, the lesson here seems to be that line drying in the cold, even the sunny, breezy kind of cold, requires a significant time investment. Good to know.

I finished a new song this morning, and then was unable to rid it from my head for the rest of the day . . . aargh! Hopefully, I'll be able to get some sound clips up online sometime in the next month or two, as well as some content for MissLynn.com (gasp)!

I'll leave you with a couple more photos from Thanksgiving, and my first attempt at felting. In a nutshell, this is a process using heat and water on wool yarn, which causes it to shrink and mat together. When you make the original item pre-felting, it obviously has to be larger than you want the finished product. Here is the hat I made to felt beside a normal-sized hat of similar shape:


And atop an average-sized head:


I was to discover that this endeavor was also to be a lesson in non-colorfast dyes, as you can see from these post-felting pictures:



My favorite detail is the swirly star-shape on the top.


More tales of lessons learned (life, knitting and otherwise) to come!