Mossy Cottage Knits

Mmmm, banana pit...

Wow, UFOs heading to the finish line at warp speed.

David would be right with you on the banana thing - he can't stand them. Personally, I don't think it would bother me much. I just figure it'll come out in the wash. Or remember back to my undergrad chemistry that the smell is an ester that should volatilize eventually.

I think I know of something worse than eau de banana. One evening I had a lovely snack of a bowl of cereal (Honey Nut Cheerios). When finished I set my bowl on the floor and picked up my knitting. After a minute I noticed that the yarn felt funny, and wasn't sliding on the needles vary well. It turned out the yarn was coming out of the skein and getting dragged across the cereal bowl and picking up the cereal-and-milk dregs. It was a sticky, sweet-ish smelling, yucky mess.

PS - I love the stream scarf pattern, but I can't quite get the hang of cabling 8, so I modified it to cable 4. The pattern is more subtle, but I still like it.

Rachel, as if my banana adventures weren't bad enough, I did the same thing as you! Only I dragged the yarn through some tea, which had mucho sugar in it, so there was a major stickiness factor and a major warmness factor. Blech. I had to wash a few yards of the yarn when I discovered what I had been doing.

LOVE the margaritaville socks and hat!! Great colors!

Put the yarn in a covered container with a few briquets of charcoal (the plain kind of charcoal, not the matchlight kind). Let sit overnight, and voila! The odor will be gone.

Advice from your know-it-all friend Karen.

Me likee the squirrels!!! So very pretty - that is good work. Pat yourself on the back. (Maybe use the non-banana arm)

Oh BLECH!! You should have put up a warning to today's post for those among us who can't be within 50 paces of a banana! EEEWWW! OK, perhaps I protest to much, but I do detest bananas, so I can hardly imagine the horror you are experiencing.

Go, Squirrel, Go!

i'm allergic to bananas, so my stuff never smells like bananas. in fact, my husband is allergic to bananas as well, and neither son cares for them, so we NEVER have bananas in the house. breaks my heart (ripe banana smell makes me nauseous, i'm so allergic)

i'm making a red scarf from my own handspun for the red scarf project in mistake rib. i'd forgotten how much i enjoy working with my handspun. you might want to recommend it to TMK (so you don't have those little critters chewing at you again)

Wow, olympic squirrel looks great! It really looks like squirrels!

Holy cats! Are you ever knitting like the wind! I'm still at the learning stage where I have to concentrate too hard to knit to be able to have car knitting, although I don't think my tongue pokes out of the corner of my mouth all the time anymore. I love to eat bananas but can not abide fake banana in anything. I even like the smell but it would be too awful on yarn, all scratch 'n sniff-ish, like those stickers my kids used to put on everything. Yuk.

Doncha love it when Dr. Mel analyses the chemical components of your posts? ;-)

Ryan, I've had good luck deoderizing odiferous handknits and yarn (tobacco smoke, musty attic smell) using the Crumpled Newspaper method. I found this technique on the Internet and wish I could remember where to give proper credit. Whoever invented this, THANK YOU.
Here's how it works: take a brown paper grocery bag, crumple several sheets of newspaper (enough to fill the bag loosely), tuck the smelly item in the middle, and staple the bag shut. For light-colored or precious items you might want to surround them (again loosely) with clean white tissue to protect them from the newsprint. Write the date on the outside of the bag and set it aside for 3 weeks or so, or until you remember it again. (I'm easily distracted, so this can run to months.) The newspaper seems to absorb the smell and the formerly smelly item becomes remarkably not-so.
I don't know how well this would work with banana smell, but it might be worth a try. BTW, in the 1930s amyl acetate, which is artificial banana flavoring, was used in agriculture as a locust repellant. Ivan Doig's novel Bucking the Sun has a vivid description of just how awful it smelled. Cheers! --Carol

I love how the margaritaville socks turned out and the matching hat is so cute.

Hope I see you at VY&T when I get back in town this weekend. Better tell TMK to get cracking on that spinning :-)

I just clicked on "What Happened to Dulaan?" even though I had seen the original post. Am I ever glad I did because I was able to read Cuzzin Tom's comments regarding F.I.R.E. He's a gem, all right, and gave me a much needed reminder that things are rarely all or nothing, black or white. Now I can't wait for...(cue mysterious music)...the next installment!

While I do understand that banana scented yarn can be displeasing, and a banana scented armpit could be very odd too, I must admit that the real horror here would be if the banana ended up being pit scented :) That thought is making me a bit banana-phobic as I type.