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Posts Tagged ‘recycling’

I’ve written some about my frustrated experiences with trying to recycle yarn, but I ran across this idea for another way to give new life to old, ruined wool sweaters: full/felt the hell out of them and turn them into knitting baskets, basket liners or bags! If you have one or find one at the thrift store that you like but it doesn’t look like a good candidate for frogging to reuse the yarn, just reuse the whole thing. Throw it in a pillow case and put it through a hot, soapy wash and then cut and stitch to make your new item. I was going to knit a few such projects and full them myself but this is a great, time saving alternative, and it gives new life to a sweater someone will probably never buy or really want to wear if they do buy it. Less wool in the landfills?

Check out the inspiration for this idea.

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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 Read the rest of this entry »

(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 Read the rest of this entry »