REWINDING. Knitting yarn that has been already knitted and is crinkled can be straightened out in either of the following ways. 1. Rewind it into a skein by passing it around two chairs. Then hold the skein taut before the spout of a steaming kettle.... 2. Wind the yarn round an aluminium hot-water bottle, and fill it with boiling water and leave it until cool
Frogging, the pulling on the end of a knitted item to undo it, leaves the yarn kinked like a frog legs MMMM which make up the little V’s of knitting stitches. If your garment is a disaster, you frog it, sometimes early in your effort and sometimes at the very end. So what to do?
Now, you can be lazy and just wind it into a ball and hope the kinks disappear. I recently read advice to wind it into a skein and soak it in water. Here we see two other ways from Mary Thomas’s Knitting Book from 1938 and they show you how a British woman would have done it back then. Both use hot water, one in the form of team, with the tea kettle which would have been found in practically every home back then, and the other in something I have never seen: a metal hot-water bottle. While we today often use aluminum for bottles for drinks, we see hot-water bottles made of rubber. But we do different types of tea kettles including electric which would make this pretty easy I am thinking. Or should I continue to be lazy? Hmmmm....
This book, btw, is an extraordinary introduction to the history and techniques of knitting as known in 1938 and is found in reprints at Dover Publications: https://store.doverpublications.com/0486228177.html