Runaway October

I’ve been tagged by Tamara of Quar­ter of an inch, so here’s my… uhm, entry?

“Open the 6^th pic­ture folder on your com­puter, open the 6^th photo and blog it. Write some­thing about it. Then tag 6 more peo­ple to do the same.”

This pic­ture is hor­ri­ble. It’s fuzzy and there’s a shadow run­ning through it. I like it though. It’s my lit­tle brother pos­ing while get­ting ready to play WoW. Notice the cute pink tower in the lower cor­ner, it’s my moms com­puter — doesn’t that rock? He’s sin­gle ladies. I’ll give you his email

As far as tag­ging peo­ple, well… if you’d like to play please help your­self. Just leave a lit­tle com­ment to let us know and we’ll come visit once you post. Capiche?

PAY IT FORWARD

The first THREE peo­ple to leave a com­ment on this post will receive, at some point dur­ing the year, a hand­made gift from me. What it will be and when it will arrive is a total sur­prise. The catch is that you must par­tic­i­pate as well. Before you leave your com­ment here, write up a pay it for­ward post on your Blog to keep the fun going ( or you can cut and paste from this one like I did ) then come back and let me know you’re going to play. Then sit back and wait to receive your fun gift : ) Remem­ber that only the first THREE com­ments will receive a gift from me, so hurry, hurry, hurry !

Thanks Lisa!

Once you get used to the new look, you may notice a new ban­ner in my side­bar for the Piece-Along Coin Quilt. Yes, I’ve joined another sew-along.

This one is being hosted by Juli­ette of Chick­pea Sewing Stu­dio and Karin of Orange Flower. Both are won­der­fully crafty ladies and two of the first crafty blogs I ever sub­scribed to. They have decided to do a quilt-along, piece-along, sew-along, what-have-you-along based around the Chi­nese Coins quilt pattern.

I’ve added a cou­ple extremely beau­ti­ful exam­ples in the post, but you can find many many more in the 2009 Coin Quilt Piece-Along Flickr Pool. The Moda Bake Shop has a great tuto­r­ial designed by the lovely Aman­da­jean of Crazy­MomQuilts and MaryQuilts has 3 tuto­ri­als, plus many other quilt pat­terns in her left sidebar.

So if you’re inter­ested please join us!

While Matt and I are work­ing on another project or two, I got a wild hair to change my blog theme.

I think maybe I have set­tled for this one, what do you think? Grandma approves and I think she’s right!:-D

O, some of you have asked — The house hunt­ing is going slowly… oh so slowly. You’d think it’d be a great time to shop right now. Unfor­tu­nately for us, not only have a major­ity of the pre­vi­ous house own­ers let their mort­gages go into fore­clo­sure but they’ve also decided to trash every­thing pos­si­ble. Clean­ing is one thing, seri­ous repairs are another. And appli­ances. Buy­ing a house is so much work!

Recently I’ve come across a cou­ple arti­cles and tuto­ri­als on how to recy­cle yarn. At first I thought some­one was tak­ing it too far. I mean, wouldn’t that be a HUGE amount of work for a lit­tle bit of yarn? No. Think about how many skeins of yarn it takes to make a nor­mal sweater — 4, 8, 12? Depends on the sweater and the yarn but that’s a lot of money if you buy some­thing that isn’t ugly clearance-pile acrylic. Just a decent small wool skein is $5!

So I experimented.

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I bought two small hooded Good­will sweaters, cute as but­tons, but only big enough to fit one of my boobs in. Okay, more than that but just know­ing that some­one that petite existed made me want to destroy the sweaters. Kid­ding! They were 100% cot­ton and appeared to be Super Bulky. I did the seam check… Awe­some! The pan­els were shaped, not knit­ted in large blocks, cut and then serged together. That would mean that the yarn would be in lots of lit­tle pieces instead of one con­tin­u­ous strand. Had the sweaters been made out of an acrylic I wouldn’t have both­ered because acrylic is so much cheaper in the stores that it’s not worth the work.

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Basi­cally, all I had to do was sep­a­rate the sweater pieces — hood, sleeves, back, placket, etc and then unravel them. I used no fancy tools besides a seam rip­per, and just wound the yarn around my arm, like you would do with an exten­sion cord. It didn’t take me very long as once I had the sec­tions sep­a­rated I could wind the yarn while watch­ing TV with­out pay­ing atten­tion. It was def­i­nitely a good work­out for my “mama arms”! Because the sweaters were made of cot­ton yarn I washed them first as there was no risk of felt­ing, but now that it’s unrav­eled it’s kinky as shown by the pic­tures. So I’ll soak it in hot water and then hang it out to dry with a lit­tle bit of weight on it. The top pic­ture is on a full sized cof­fee table for an idea of how much yarn one sweater gave me. Oh, and both had about 8 really cute but­tons on them that I can reuse too.

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A few tidbits:

• Uncer­tain if it is wool or not? Soak it overnight in straight bleach. If it dis­solves then it is wool. If noth­ing changes then it is prob­a­bly acrylic.
• Angora is oh so soft and pretty in a com­pleted sweater but does not unravel well. Either does any­thing furry, eye­lashy or bumpy.
• Try not to cut any of the yarn while pulling out the seams. You’ll have to splice it back together.
• Make sue to label your fin­ished yarn so you remem­ber the fiber con­tent of your fin­ished prod­uct. Here are some PDF labels from MysticSpiral.com
• Don’t like the color but the yarn is won­der­ful? Dye it!
• Rethink lace-weight sweaters. If you’re doing every­thing by hand, you’ll never fin­ish unrav­el­ing. I know I didn’t.
• Watch out for but­ton holes. If they are on a sep­a­rate placket then just dis­card the placket. If the but­ton holes are cut and sewn into the body of the sweater that yarn will be cut and not con­tin­u­ous. Either splice the yarn back together, dis­card the button-holed sec­tion or look for a dif­fer­ent sweater. 

Here are a cou­ple tuto­ri­als if you are interested:

• www.neauveau.com/recycledyarn.html
• http://laughingpurplegoldfish.blogspot.com/2008/10/recycling-yarn-from-jumper.html
• http://dawnprickett.blogspot.com/2008/01/recycling-sweaters-for-yarn.html
• http://www.az.com/~andrade/knit/thrifty.html
• http://www.craftleftovers.com/blog/archives/401

Oh and if you have any wool or cot­ton sweaters lay­ing around that you don’t want and they aren’t serged I’d love to have them!