I thought I would show you why I bother to hank and scour coned yarns rather than knitting straight from the cone and washing the dried-hair-mousse-y mill oils out later.

Usually I buy 150 gram cones, and that’s what the start of the baby blanket used up. This one, though, was 1050 grams of a cotton and cashmere blend and without a swift (or maybe even with), there was no way I was going to be able to do all that in one go. My niddy-noddy cried uncle at 360 grams.

The resulting hank, scoured, blow-dried and wound back up, is on the left–while there are still 690 grams on the cone on the right. Nearly twice.

The ball is solid, other than that little belly button from my thumb while I was winding it. The cone is a goodly amount of cardboard-and-air. That picture is taken straight on, and if there’s any distortion it’s that it quite understates how much bigger the ball is in every dimension–maybe I should take a side view shot, too.

Between the soapy water that was hotter than I could touch (I used the bottom of the Seventh Generation bottle to push it down in the sink there, and after rinsing spun it out in the washing machine) and the blow-drying afterwards because there was so. much. yarn, I like to think that any shrinkage that was going to happen has happened. There will be no surprises when I’m done knitting this, nor, hopefully, to the recipients when they wash their blanket.

There’s also this one other big reason for doing that extra work: the yarn on the cone is, eh. But washed! It’s so baby soft. I get to experience what they will with it.

(Second picture, for scale: placed on a well-loved 8″ x 9.5″ Barbara Walker’s Second Treasury of Knitting Patterns.)