Recycling sweaters...

If you check the inside of a sweater, you can tell if it has been cut from a big peice of knitted material and the edges serged to keep it from unraveling, or if it was first knit as peices and then sewn together. If it was knit as peices, it is a candidate for unraveling. My other requirement is that it be made from natural fibers, although I probably wouldn't unravel a cotton sweater. I just don't like knitting with cotton that much.

So, I found four sweaters: the one I felted and three others...

The "picture" sweater was knit from two strands of shetland wool yarn held together. You can't see it in this picture, but it has blue and red and other fibers blended together in the dark yarn. So far, I have unraveled both sleeves. Just from the sleeves I got 80 yards of double stranded white, and 240 yards of the dark. This sweater is very slow going because before it can be unraveled, you have to pick out all the embroidery that was done on top of the knitting. I probably will not be unraveling the front, which has so much embroidery I would probably lose my mind trying to get it all off. Plans right now are to cut it into a square, back it with blue jean material, and make a holiday pillow out of the front and to unravel the back.

The cream colored yarn on the right is a combination of 55% silk, 33% nylon, 10%angora and 3% lambswool. It is absolutely the softest yarn! It has a lovely nubbly texture, the angora halo, and I am pretty sure if I decide to dye it, it will take dye beautifully. I have no idea how many yards I have, but I got over 200 yards on the first sleeve alone. I think this is what I am going to knit that smoke ring that I have been wanting to knit out of.

The red yarn has no sweater with it because I completely unraveled it on Wednesday night. It was just a plain knit pullover sweater, made from lambswool and angora. I got roughly 110 yards from each sleeve, and I forget how much from the back and front, I'll have to check later. This is probably going to be over dyed, the red is a little much for me. All in all, a good haul for sweaters that cost me 2 dollars each. It was really a lot of fun to "unknit" something for a change.

In other news, I finished the fronts for the aran cardigan last night!! Yeah! Then, after laying out the fronts, I discovered that I had made a huge mistake. I shaped the wrong sides of the fronts, so the cables were not going to meet up at the shoulders. For a moment, I debated cutting up the whole sweater into teeny tiny peices of fluff. Then I decided that instead, I will just knit saddles for the top of each arm, and hopefully the break at the top of the arm will trick the eye into not noticing the mistake. I am just too sick of this sweater to consider ripping the fronts back and starting again. Besides, I've always wanted to knit a sweater with saddles at the top of the shoulder, it'll be fun, right?

After receiving the latest issure of SpinOff in the mail, I had to drag out the knitting machine and try my hand at knitting up blanks and dyeing them. Let me tell you, it is much easier to dye a knitted blank than to wind yarn into a huge skein and then dye it for self striping yarn. I was really pleased with the colors in this, but I need a much bigger workspace to really get into this. A large peice of foam insulation would be great, I think. Anyway, I am planning on doing more of this in the future, in better colors, and hope to have some for sale, as soon as the programmer extroidenaire finishes her website or I figure out Etsy, whichever comes first, LOL.

I have been trying to get this post right since Thursday, but blogger and I were having a slight power struggle. For the most part, blogger kicked my heiny. Anyway, here it is now, in a greatly modified and shortened version.

After being less than pleased with my first attempt at the color way I have been working on, I went back to the drawing board this morning. I started by laying out all the colors I plan on using. I want the apple green to dominate, so I used more of that. I am also using a small amount of an alpaca/mohair mix that I dyed at the same time as I dyed the wool. The Mohair/Alpace will give the finished yarn some texture.

Striping the riving on the carder didn't work, so I went for a different approach. First I carded on the small amount of contrast colors I had. Then the apple green, bronze green and golden nugget. Last, I carded on the mohair blend. I stripped the batt in half and placed the two pieces together, the sides with the mohair blend sandwiched in the middle. Then I put the whole thing through the carder again

Pleased with how the batt had turned out I split it into a long w, predrafted it a little and then wound it up into a ball. You can see here how different this predrafted roving (the one in the back) is from the one that was just stripes on the drumcarder.(The small ball in the front)

I spun the roving using the point of contact method of spinning I have been practicing for the last week. I am getting better at it. There are still times when I don't get enough twist in the yarn before it pulls onto the bobbin and falls apart, but for the most part, I'm getting more consistant. As irritating as it is sometimes, I really like how fast this is, and how soft the plyed yarn is. I am having much less of a problem with overtwisting, and most of the skeins hang in a circle instead of twisting back on themselves now.

Now I like this yarn. I hope to have a swatch done to show you tommorrow, but let me know what you think. I'd like to know.