cashmere longies

I got a lot of sewing done Wednesday morning, thanks to an earth quake waking me up at 4 am (yes, an earth quake in Illinois!). This past Sunday I found a huge cashmere sweater, but I didn't want to put it in my shop because it had tons of moth holes everywhere. My son fell in love with it, & asked me to make him some longies (or "woolly pants", as we call them) from it, so I did! I don't even use a pattern anymore & just eyeballed them, sewing the 2 sleeves together & adding a piece of the waistband of the sweater for the waistband on the pants. I was able to avoid using the moth hole ridden parts, except for a few on one leg in an isolated area. I put a stripey square over it, and I think it looks cute, if I do say so myself. Since it was such a huge sweater, the sleeves were actually too long for once, so I cut the cuffs off, intending on making new ones, but I like the looks of them without the cuffs... like karate pants. Once summer hits, i'll cut them even shorter, into board shorts. I probably didn't need an extra layer in the wet zone, because they are pretty thick, but since I had a big holey piece I couldn't use for anything else, I used it inside for a hammock style wet zone. My kid never grows wider, only taller, so I always make an adjustable rise waist from the soft ribbing of the sweater.

Rise up..................................... rise down.

A reader asked me if I could explain how I lanolize my diaper covers, so hopefully this will benefit some of you. First of all, those of you not cloth diapering are probably wondering what the heck lanolizing is. It is adding lanolin back into wool (or cashmere) to make them water resistant. Lanolin comes in different forms. They come in bars with soap, wool washes, liquid lanolin, with different amounts of lanolin in them. There are a dozen different ways to lanolize, all of them correct, but I will explain how I personally lanolize. I make my own wool wash... about 2 tbs of liquid lanolin, a squirt of shampoo (I also use Bronner's soap sometimes too), and I shake it up with about a quart of warm water in a bottle to melt the lanolin, so it mixes up well. I use about 2 ounces of this (sorry for all of the "about's", but I don't measure things out) per load of wool. When I first make a pair of longies, or it's been a long time, I take a pea sized amount of lanolin and work it into the wet zone with my hands. To wash them I rinse the diaper covers in cold water, then gently swirl them in a bucket of tepid water and about 2 ounces of the wool wash. I leave them in there for an hour or 2, then gently squeeze the water out (not wring!), and roll them in a towel to remove the excess water and lay them flat to dry. I know it sounds complicated, but it really isn't, and you don't have to do it often. I am continuously amazed at how many times wool can be peed on, and smell fresh as a daisy a few hours later, without being washed. Lanolin is bacteriostatic, meaning that it inhibits the growth of bacteria, which is what causes odors.