Knit for Brains dot Net

Posts Tagged ‘Knitting’

The other day I was looking for baskets and bins to store yarn and knitting projects at the 99.99 cent store (yes they raised the price by almost a penny!) and found this Never Not Knitting Page-a-day calendar by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, the “Yarn Harlot” for, yes, just 99.99 cents! Retail was 12.95.

Below are two videos sent to me by my penpal Larisa. She knits socks using 5 crochet hooks instead of DPNs and it’s pretty fast. Very cool idea. I hope you can pick up the idea from the videos. I bet of you could keep track you could do patterns with this method. The videos require Quicktime to be installed on your computer. The video will take a couple minutes to download.

Fast sock knitting with crochet hooks.

Hook Knitting Detail Video

In my previous post about recycling yarn I stated that I didn’t like the process of hunting for the source sweater at a thrift shop, and I’m sticking with that opinion. You will not find me giving but a cursory glance at the sweaters there when I’m there for something else. It’s just too much effort for too little result. I have better things to do with that time.

I did however realize that recycling a new sweater from some inexpensive shop such as Ross or Marshalls is a great option. I was there shopping for the holidays last month and was lured to the men’s sweater rack. One thing I was confident of was that I would not be disappointed by finding a great sweater that had been ruined by washing and felting/fulling. While there were not a lot of colors and fibers that I wanted I did find one that is perfect.

A lot of nice yarn for just $20. Maybe I'll make a scarf and socks.

It’s a gray sweater in what I believe is sport weight, 45% lambswool. 40% modal, 10% nylon and 5% cashmere. I hunted up an extra large one to get the most yarn. It weighs 495 grams. The yarn is a mix of light and dark gray called Iron Heather, so it has a tweedy look. It has all the right kinds of seams – not serged.

And of course, Max my cat has to become involved in every knitting project.

The only odd thing is that it has a design on the front in intarsia, but that shouldn’t be a problem to unravel around.

The intarsia desing reminds me of a turtle for some reason.

Outside the sweater you can see Max approving of the cashmere content. Inside the sweater you can see the intarsia work. It didn't say it was this hand knitted. Do they have machines that can do intarsia?

I will give you an update when I get around to taking this sweater apart and unraveling it.

Well, my laziness about my knitting projects and supplies has come to a head. I don’t have much yarn my any standards. After all, I’ve only been knitting for a few months, but I never really got a good set up to keep my yarn and now I’ve had enough of the mess and have finally got it managed. I’ve been the sort that had a bag of yarn or stuff from the store and just used that to store the supplies in. The bags and balls of yarn were all over the place, mostly all over the dining table and surrounding area. Here’s what it looked like.

A little blurry, a lot messy.

I’d wanted a cabinet of some sort to keep it all in but didn’t want to invest in another piece of furniture, and I didn’t want some junky piece from a thrift store. Looking for a gift for my mother for Christmas I found myself at Target, in the far back corner where the closet organizing stuff is, and ran across their Sterilite plastic storage chests. I bought one with three drawers and one with five (both were the same size, but the second had four small drawers and one large) for under $25 and went home to tackle the monster.

As you can see by the before and after pictures it made a big difference. I can actually eat at my dining table without having to move yarn and knitting first.

Yes! The Yarn has been conquered.

The wool is in the wool drawers, the blends and other sorts of yarn are all in their own drawers, and the various tools and needles all have their places. My great knitpicks.com ball winder is put away, my crochet needles are separate from the knitting needles. The many started projects are in appropriate drawers in stead of lying all over the place accusing me of what I’m guilty of (neglect, distraction and indecision), and I have my sanity back. Some of it.

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(Be sure to see part 2 of this topic at this link)

Well, I made a trip to our local Savers Thrift Department store to look for decent wool sweaters from which to recycle the yarn. I thought this would be a great, economical way to obtain several skeins worth of yarn for just about $6. In general, I do believe recycling yarn can be a worthwhile endeavor, but I don’t think it’s for me. The reality of the hunt is not worth the result, which today resulted in more awareness than wool.

First thing I did was examine the 20 feet of men’s sweaters. Feeling along the edges of them for something that might be wool, as well as looking for sweaters that are mostly a solid color I discovered a few things about the sweater search that I don’t care for.

1. I don’t want to spend an hour pawing through hundreds of used sweaters. My time is worth more. On top of that I partially reinjured my mostly healed sprained finger sliding sweaters around on over-burdened racks.
2. Many of the sweaters are not solids, so you can’t get long runs of yarn out of them.
3. Some of them are sewn from cut steeks and can’t be unraveled in continuous strands.
4. Precious few haven’t been partially felted. I don’t know if Savers is washing these or the previous owners are the monster yarn murderers. Even one short wash will make the strands look very second hand, and I don’t want a new garment to look pre-owned from the get go. Also, a bit of felting will make it harder to pull out the stitches.
5. Some have stains. Do I want to spend $X on dry cleaning it before I cannibalize it? Not unless it’s a great looking yarn. Great looking yarn is very rare in situation.
6. Few of them are colors I want to work with. Do I really need that much DK weight, red yarn in 60% lambswool, 20% acrylic and 20% angora rabbit? It was almost the only one I found that wasn’t partially felted and had any potential. Do I know anyone who wants a bunch of socks made from this? I certainly don’t.

In the end I went up to the check out with a smallish women’s sweater in a bulky roving-type yarn that was dark gray and black mix. It was 20 percent alpaca, 70 percent wool and 10 percent acrylic, with cotton embroidery and the right kind of seams. I thought I could maybe get some yarn for a decent hat and scarf out of it. I waited a rather long time in line, observing the checker struggle four times trying to get the card swiper to work for a customer ahead of me, as well as other complications with the people in line. Having had this time to reflect on the whole, slummy experience, I turned around, put the sweater back where I found it and left empty-handed but with an armful of awareness.

Recycling yarn is more akin to hand-me-down-ism than you realize. You don’t have much of a choice. You have to decide if you want to make anything from what you do find that is decent. Do you like the color and the yarn? Will anyone else. It was kind of depressing to think I might get stuck with some yarn I don’t love and am not inspired by, and then drag myself through a project I know I’m going to want to give away, knowing it’s not just a gift, it’s getting rid of the stuff. I don’t want to give that kind of vibe to others, and I don’t want to keep it, a souvenir of the dismal fate of so many sweaters and a disappointing search.

You may have much better luck and spirit about yarn recycling that I do. To me though, after what I saw today, it’s more akin to picking at a trash heap than finding treasure. I want to feel better about the process of finding the yarn and its condition. I also prefer not to feel like I’m knitting in a compromise due to poverty. I can afford yarn, and even if I make the effort buy it cheaper online, at least it’s not what to me would feel like reclaimed junk.

Be sure to see part 2 of this topic at this link

You can get some great things at thrift stores. My favorite chair and a marble topped occasional table came from there, and a couple of vests I have. And I did have one super sweater find a couple of years ago, before I ever considered knitting: a fair isle sweater in 100% alpaca, NEW, in colors I love, for just $7. It is one of my cherished possessions. Here it is:

The suggested retail for this brand of 100% alpaca sweater was $150 for a solid color, and this one is multicolor fair isle. Maybe $250?

I know that’s backwards, but I couldn’t resist.

I got my ball winder from knitpics.com the other day and it’s pretty cool. Very affordable at just 19.99. I didn’t have any skeins I wanted to ball up yet so I turned its fury on a scarf I crocheted back in May before I decided to get into knitting. It was the bulky Wool-ease in a sort of oatmeal color. The scarf didn’t excite me, just done in alternating rows of dc done in the back loop. It had an interesting accordion like texture but seeing it was 105 degrees outside I was not too attached to it. I decided to canibalize it for a cossack hat and so threw it to the hungry ball winder.

The top of the winder has a sort of notch to hold the start of the yarn but it’s not cut right for a bulky yarn. Once I got it started it made short work of the scarf. I held it to the floor with a foot and just wound away. The ball winder is designed to put more distance between the turns of the yarn than I would have thought. As you can see in the picture it’s not closely wound. So the ball was bigger than perhaps necessary, and being bulky yarn it turned into a ball that was a little too large for the winder to finish.

It was crochet; it had to be destroyed.

.

So now I have a very cool ball of yarn to turn “reinyarnate” into a hat. (Read about technique below…)

Proof of Reinyarnation

There is a bit of a technique to using a ball winder. One thing I find is that if I don’t control the incoming yarn it will flop about a lot and the ball will be kind of loose and larger when done. So what I do is take a small piece of fabric and hold it loosely around the strand of yarn so that it keeps a very mild tension on the line. This produces a somewhat smaller ball and deters the yarn from tangling in the wire yarn guide.

Another thing I do is put the source skein or ball in a shoebox or paper bag on the floor. Backing up a bit: I clamp my ball winder to the back of a chair and put the source yarn on the floor below it. So with the source in a bag or box it won’t travel all over the room.

And sometimes I will put the source on a vertical paper towel holder if I can get the rod through the ball/skein easily. This helps more with oblong skeins you buy at craft stores as when they are being unwound they can flop about a lot in the bag or box. Don’t expect them to actually turn on the towel holder, and at a certain point you will have to deal with the last bit of yarn flopping about oddly anyway.

I find the ball winder very handy, and use it to rewind balls for projects that I’m restarting, or when I’m done with part of a ball, as the ball becomes squishy when you pull from the center and it’s nice to put it back in good order for storage or further use. And you can in many cases, of course, rewind and rip out at the same time, straight back to the ball.