Runaway October

I have a con­fes­sion. I can be quite a slob.

The evi­dence: Exhibit A — My craft room, The SMOR (sewing machine oper­a­tions room), about 24 hours ago.

When we bought this house, we knew one of the rooms would be used for hob­bies. Unfor­tu­nately, we had been using the din­ing room table pre­vi­ously so we had no fur­ni­ture to set up in there. About the time we moved, I was given a very nice cut­ting table and sewing machine desk. They came from a fam­ily friend who had passed away. Sadly, she was a heavy smoker and smoked in her hobby room. The tables just ooze nicotine.

My father in law con­vinced me that I shouldn’t try to paint them, as they’re cov­ered in melamine. While I’m fairly cer­tain I would be able to repaint them, new fur­ni­ture would be eas­i­est. Of course I decided this after try­ing to clean one of the tables with bleach (Bleck!) and ruin­ing a per­fectly good skirt.

So I struck a deal with my hus­band. If I clean the craft room, could we build new fur­ni­ture for the room? He agreed, poor sap.

So this is where it stands cur­rently. Not “clean” per se, but every­thing has been gone through and sorted and I found all kinds of stuff I had for­got­ten about! Score. My M.O. was to grab what I needed, take it down stairs to craft, bag/box up what­ever was left and toss it in the SMOR when I was done. Bad bad. I had at least 15 empty boxes when I was done, and dou­ble that amount of bags to recycle

(I still need to vac­uum, obviously.)

This is the table I want we’ll be mak­ing, free plans cour­tesy of Knock Off Wood. It’ll go well with the IKEA Expe­dit book­case that’s in there currently.

I know that if I had a vehi­cle right now, me and the boys would be ter­ror­iz­ing Home Depot and Lowe’s. I’ll keep you posted on our progress. I’m super excited to make my own craft fur­ni­ture, and for so much less than Pot­tery Barn too!

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!