Mindless ripping... =)

We're on a budget. We do okay, but there's not a lot of room for expensive non-necessities. In my case, that means nice yarn for my knitting/crocheting projects. One hank of really nice alpaca wool can run you about $17. For one! Then I remembered that some of my friends recycle thrift store sweaters, and I wondered how hard it could be. It sounded complicated, but maybe it would be worth it. I did some internet research, found some great tutorials, and hit the clearance section at the local consignment store.

For about 3 bucks, I came up with this:

Now, the top gray one is an old one of mine. I had shrunk it, and thought, why not try recycling the yarn? The others cost me between $0.25 and $1.40 each. Not bad for one morning of digging through the discount bins.

I washed, dried, and began.

First, I ripped out the seams. Except for my shrunken one (which was really fuzzy, and kind of "felted", all I had to do was find the right end, and with one pull, I could rip from cuff to bottom hem. Goodbye side seam! A little more work with the collars, and shoulders, and I had a pile of sweater pieces that looked something like this:

Then I found the top string, dug it out, and started unraveling. The bottom of my end table made a perfect winding area, don't you think?

I ended up with several hanks from each sweater that looked something like this:

They were all kind of kinky from being in a sweater of course, so once the sweater was finished, I gave them a cold bath and hung them up to dry, in hopes of getting most of the kinks out. I forgot to take pictures of this, but let's just say, my family got a kick out of seeing peanut butter jars weighing them down. =)

I've only done 4, and stopped to work on a project with the yellow yarn, but so far, for my work, I have all this yarn, just waiting to be used!

Now two of the sweaters pictured in this yarn pile were cotton, and two were wool, so I'm not sure exactly how much money it would have cost me new, but I'm guessing I probably got around $75 worth of yarn for less than $5 ( don't remember how much the old sweater of mine cost, but it wasn't much)

The best part? It was mindless, and fun, and I needed mindless lately. =)

I realize most of you probably won't care in the least, but I wanted to share anyway. It made me happy. =)