Today I went to Goodwill for some good old-fashioned thrift store shopping. I had just read in Debbie Stoller’s Stitch ‘N Bitch: The Knitter’s Handbook that you can take thrift store sweaters and make yarn for cheap, so I thought I’d give it a shot. I found three sweaters for Operation: Sweater Deconstruction (a blue one made mainly of wool, a white one and a pink one, both a cotton/acrylic blend). I took my new finds home and began to deconstruct those puppies with the precision of a surgeon.
Taking apart the seams by far was the most time consuming part of the job, especially on the white sweater. The hems were sewn and tucked into each other making it very difficult to rip it out easily. I made the mistake on the blue one to cut the whole hem thus creating bits of yarn that fly all over the place when wrapping into hanks. Once I got all of the pieces of the sweater separated, I went to town forming hanks with my newly attained yarn.
I came up with a pretty cool idea for wrapping the hanks up (of course after I just wrapped the yarn into somewhat balls until I figured out how to get it into hanks). Anywho, so I flipped over a TV dinner tray and used the legs for a way to wrap the yarn into a hank. Originally I tried a dining room chair back but the decorative knobs on the chair got in the way. The smoothness of the wood finish on the legs of the dinner tray helped slide the yarn off easily too.
It took awhile to get the hang of it all but I was able to create a pretty quick process of wrapping hanks. What a fun process that was. My arms got a little tired but once I saw the hanks start piling up, joy filled my heart. OK, maybe not that cheesy but I did get pretty excited and the possibilities ahead.
I haven’t yet decided what I’m doing with all this yarn. I’m not necessarily fond of the cotton candy pink so I may darken it if possible. The white might be fun to dye but it is cotton so it’ll be more complicated. But here’s all the yarn I created from three sweaters bought at Goodwill for a total of $15. Operation: Sweater Deconstruction complete.
Next mission: Operation: Wash & Straighten.
Be inspired.
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