New project for me?

I’ve been wanting to make one of these “big-knit” afghans at the request of one of my daughters for a loooooong time. What’s stopped me is, you know, … pets. Specifically, my cats (they pick at EVERYTHING) and her dogs (they bounce around and climb and chew everywhere).

And wool roving or batting can be picked apart so easily.

But this fabulous instructional explains how to lightly felt the wool, and I’m hoping that will make a difference in the durability of the “yarn.” (Now if I can just get over the price of buying that much wool …)

Bonus: That article linked above also includes a link to the pattern.

Use batting, or roving?

If you’re just nuts about learning more about fiber like I am, you’ll also enjoy this interesting “batting vs. roving” article, explaining the differences between:

• wool batting (wool that has been scoured, dyed and carded — available in sheets), and
• wool roving (wool that has been scoured, dyed, carded and combed), available in long lengths, sometimes rolled in balls.

From their explanation of how batting has fibers going in multiple directions and will thus felt better, I think batting would work best for this project. What do you think?

Even better … the article links to fiber sources!

Project Gutenberg side note

(Issue #2) I’m annoyed I can’t find the “insert symbol” tool again in the Gutenberg editor for WordPress. I dug around yesterday until I found it but now I’ve lost it again. I purely hate to use two hyphens instead of a true em dash. (It’s the ol’ typesetter in me.)

So I Googled it … and this discussion makes it sound like I can only do this in Gutenberg’s code editor OR by switching to the classic (non-Gutenberg) editor. YUCK.

I miss the old interface’s use of the omega symbol to access special characters like the em dash!

(Issue #3) I’m super-annoyed that I can’t change the color of a single word (or group of words) without changing the color of the whole paragraph. And I don’t know enough css to be able to change the automatic color of linked text. (The problem is that links are exactly the same color as the text, so only hovering over text allows the reader to know a link is there. Shitty design.) As a temporary workaround, I’m bolding all links from here on out. If I’m not too lazy, I will also switch over to the classic editor … grr … and insert some color to the links.