She seeketh wool and flax and worketh willingly with her hands. --Proverbs 31:13

9/28/2006

We ran to town Tuesday night and stopped at the local thrift store. Sean and chad were looking for jeans, but I was looking for sweaters! I found 4 that looked like they would be able to be taken apart for the yarn. When I got home, I realized it would probably be better to felt the Fair Isle sweater that I found, even thought it was 100% Shetland wool. All the ends were cut and it would never have unraveled right.

So I got up Wednesday morning and threw it in the washing machine. It was a Men's medium sweater, and by the time it was done felting it was about three times as thick and sized about a girls small, LOL. After it dried I cut it up and made a bag, using this pattern from Alterknits. Mine did not look as good as the ones in the pattern. I think because the felt was thicker, and had lost all of it's "curl". I still need to do a little work to it and then maybe it will look better.



So then I decided to try something else. I had a little girls sweater here that had felted, and I cut out 2 peices from it, and 2 from the sleeves of the fair isle sweater to make this bag. It's still far from perfect, my sewing was as crooked as all get out and it's hard to pick stitches out of felt. So I'm going to try to get Sean to go back to the thrift stores tonight to see if I can find more.



As for the other three sweaters, they have been mostly reduced to lovely skeins of yarn! More on that next time.

1 comment:

Laura said...

Hi Jan! So glad to see you're posting - I was about ready to email and see if everybody was doing all right at your house! :)

The felted sweater is a GREAT idea - I need to check our thrift stores in Wichita to see what I can find! Somehow I think either nobody has any good wool sweaters to get rid of or else someone else goes through picking out the best ones to recycle because the last time I was there the selection was nil.

Take care and don't go so long between posts. :)