Knit for Brains dot Net

Posts Tagged ‘wool’

Got a little yarn for a tiny project? Do you like to carry crystals or other lucky/healing stones in your pocket or purse, but don’t want them damaged by coins and other hard things in there with them? Knit a crystal cozy! These would make great mini-gifts for friends as well.

They are about 2.5 to 3 inches long. Make yours to fit your stone plus and inch or more so the ribbing can close the opening

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

To my readers and subscribers: I do enjoy your “patronage.” If you like my blog, please forward some links to my site to your knitting pals. Thanks!

Related articles by Zemanta

• How-To: “Full” a Sweater into Felt (craftzine.com)
• A Gathering of Men (timesunion.com)
• Relax here: Unlock your knitting prowess (timeoutny.com)

Yes,  I own some Wool-ease, which is mostly acrylic. I don’t really like it. I bought it when I was new to knitting. It will be okay for some projects, but I really prefer natural fiber, and my real preference is naturally dyed or naturally colored fiber.

So I have some yarn that I balled with my ball winder and now I’ve forgotten if it is all wool or not. I found on the web you can test a scrap by putting some of the yarn in a cup with some undiluted bleach overnight and if it is all wool there will be pretty much nothing solid left.

There is a faster burn test if you just need to knit now. Visit this link to read about it.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Why we must ban petroleum based synthetic yarns (timesunion.com)
• How-To: Knit stretch sensor (makezine.com)
• A Healthy Dose of Fiber (timesunion.com)
• The Strand That Binds… (timesunion.com)
• Yarndex: The Yarn Directory (timesunion.com)

(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 »