So lately I have been thrift store shopping and looking for large sweaters made with good fibers to unravel and then recycle the yarn for a new sweater. This Eddie Bauer sweater is linen, cotton and polyester. It has a nice sheen and I love the feel of the linen. It was really well made.
As you can see, this purple sweater was unraveled. This is also a linen cotton blend and yielded a lot of yarn.
There was an added bonus from the Eddie Bauer sweater... nice wooden buttons. The process of unraveling a sweater is a little tedious. So it is important to check fiber content and look at the way the sweater was made. I was unable to use the button bands because of the sewn button holes.
This is the yarn from 3 sweaters. It doesn't look like much in the picture but there is a lot of yarn. The blue and the purple sweaters had over 1000 + yards each and the linen sweater if I guesstimate is somewhere between 800 - 900 yards. The sweaters with cables have lots of yardage.
A quick look at the process... remove the neck, then pick out all the seams and then find where the end is and start pulling. If you are lucky the seams are chain stitched together and if you find the end, one tug will let you just pull the yarn and the seam will unravel.
Unfortunately this beautiful Irish knit was cut and sewn together. Not much of the yarn is usable. There is still enough for a small sweater , shrug or accessories. The yarn is beautiful wool tweed.
And... my progress on my first sweater knit with recycled yarn. It's coming along and I should have it finished this week. This is 100% cotton probably Aran weight with lots of drape. It is also very soft. Just to let you know.. this is really fun to do. Hunting down sweaters and then making them into something new. I need to decide on sweater patterns for the light blue and purple yarn now.. I can't wait to knit with the yarn!
2 comments:
I'm the opposite whenever I look for sweaters at thrift stores. I like the idea of recycling the yarn, but I usually look for something made with 100% wool in a nice pattern or color. My goal is to eventually get enough of these sweater, felt them, and sew the felt into something awesome. Unfortunately, I have come to find out it's really difficult to find 100% wool sweaters at thrift shops. Maybe it's because I live in the South and no one wears wool. But most thrift store sweaters I come across are made out of cotton or acrylic.
It must be the area you are in. There are a lot of wool and wool blend sweaters here. There were a lot of mens wool sweaters too.
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