Sweater Shrunk - Twin Willows Farm

My goodness… haven’t we all been there?!? Maybe it wasn’t a sweater maybe it was socks, mittens, or a hat. What on earth makes it happen and how do we avoid it? What’s the difference between shrinking and felting anyway?

Shrinking
As handspinners, one easy way to avoid true shrinking is to wash the yarn after it’s all spun and skeined. It is so terribly tempting to knit right off the bobbin. The yarn is fresh and your knitting needles are calling your name. Ignore that cry… stuff the needles back down into the knitting bag and wash the skein first.

Many fibers will relax to varying degrees during this first washing. Have you ever tried to put a skein back on your niddy noddy after it’s washed only to find out that it doesn’t fit anymore? The relax fibers pop out into a slightly larger diameter yarn, making the length of the skein proportionally shorter. The down breeds are especially prone to this. Garments that are knitted, crocheted or woven without pre-washing can lead to the yarn relaxing *after* it’s made into the finished product, changing the size of that product.

For this same reason, I do not recommend drying yarns under pressure for most projects. Simply wash, rinse and hang the skeins to dry. The weight of the water is all that should be needed to set the twist. Hanging a weight on the skein will cause it to stay stretched out. (If you are using the yarn for the warp threads in weaving, hanging a weight is sometimes used to keep the yarn stretched and smooth for the heddles, but it’s not needed in knitting, crochet or weft yarn.) A weighted yarn that is knitted up can relax after the first washing as a garment, creating a smaller garment than intended.

Felting
Felting also causes a garment to lose size. The cause is not a relaxing of the fibers, but rather a tightening up of the fibers. Felting is caused by moisture and friction. Many people think that water (particularly hot water) makes wool shrink, but that’s not totally true. Water plus friction makes wool felt up. Wet wool without friction will dry to its original form.

Wool fibers have tiny little scales that love to cling together. That’s what makes spinning wool so easy! But if you add a touch of moisture and rub the wool fibers together, those scales get all tangled up and cling tighter and tighter. The more rubbing, the firmer the felted fabric and the smaller the piece becomes.

Felting can be caused by careless washing, where the garment(s) is agitated or wrung. It can also be caused by wear and use. Woolen chore socks in rubber work boots on days when the temperature is high enough to make feet sweat can result in felted socks. (Take my word on this, I’ve had *lots* of unintended experiments with this process!) Wet mittens that make enough snowballs to outfit a snow fort will felt. The elbows and cuffs on sweaters that rub against the arms of chairs and on computer desks will felt over time with very little moisture. This is normal wear and tear and to be expected.

So to avoid the obvious pitfalls of shrinking and felting, care needs to be taken to pre-wash skeins and care taken to properly wash finished garments. It’s not hard to keep your woolens in good condition in fact, it quickly becomes habit that doesn’t require a second thought.

Twin Willows Farm - "My Wool Sweater SHRUNK!"