Runaway October

Julia at Hooked On Houses started a new Linky. I love Linkys. They’re a great way to find infor­ma­tion in one gen­eral post, or share a great idea or pro­mote your blog. Prob­lem is I never seem to have any­thing worth linking.

When she pro­posed Freaky Houses I instantly thought of some of the houses we saw in our house hunt­ing days. Man, what WERE those peo­ple think­ing? But then I real­ized I could use some help.

While not really freaky, my loft is… well, help­less is how I would describe it most days.

This is what up see upon com­ing up the stairs. Notice the blank, the bland, the blah. The main pur­pose of this room is a media room. Sus­pended from the ceil­ing is a pro­jecter which shines on the screen that’s rolled up in the above picture.

Stand­ing at the top of the stairs, here’s the view to your left. That sad lit­tle shelf there had good inten­tions. At the time, we needed some­thing super cheap yet strong enough to hold a receiver and a cou­ple game con­soles. Matt and his dad made the shelf, which IS super strong, but there was a mea­sure­ment mishap. Not every­thing fits. AND none of the cords are really con­cealed. Huu­uggee pet peeve of mine.

Con­tin­u­ing to the left we have our behe­moth couch. You see no laun­dry. –Jedi Mind Trick ges­ture– It was pur­chased for our old house. Max­i­mum seat­ing and small price point were the cause behind this one. It seems very over­whelm­ing, which is sur­pris­ing con­sid­er­ing the room is about 20′ x 15′. End table and cof­fee table need to be refin­ished but wait­ing on that until I have a sense of the room.

This is the view basi­cally stand­ing under the ill-fated shelf. Down the hall­way to the left is laun­dry, craft room, kids bed­room and a bath­room. The door to the right is the mas­ter bed­room. That cord should be gone as soon as we get our deliv­ery from NewEgg.com this week.

Here’s a cou­ple panora­mas. Click for larger versions.

Nor­mally I would define a few seat­ing areas, throw some rugs and call it done-ish, but there are some spe­cial con­sid­er­a­tions here. It needs to be able to be as dark as pos­si­ble in the mid­dle of the day; due to the pro­jec­tor, noth­ing can block your view of the screen and the media devices need to stay close to where the shelf is. They’re hard wired in and out of reach of small people.

This is the screen in full down posi­tion. It’s about 2′ from the ground and maybe 3′ from the right wall. That makes it really hard to put any­thing seat­ing wise along that right wall. I do have a futon that was given to us that would fit, but watch­ing the screen from it would be uncom­fort­able. And, let’s face it, futons typ­i­cally ain’t cute. The paint color is from the pre­vi­ous own­ers, so no need to keep it, per se.

I don’t nec­es­sar­ily have a bud­get, or a gen­eral time frame but a fresh set of eyes on this would be nice. If I know what I want I can start keep­ing an eye out at swap-meets, thrift stores, etc.

If this was your loft, what would you do?

Please don’t for­get to visit Julia and add your own Freaky House Pho­tos.

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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!