A Little Bit Of This, A Little Bit Of That
Two days of garage sales this week netted these finds:
The top one is a 80% acrylic, 20% wool in an oatmeal color with blue & rust flecks for 50¢. If it looks a bit funny, it's because it's half frogged - I forgot to take a "before" photo. #2 is a 100% cotton, XL, another 50¢ find. It has navy blue & red stripes across the chest, and the main color is charcoal grey. The first navy blue stripe on the front has the little polo figure embroidered on, so I'll probably lose most of the yarn for about 8 or 10 rows unless I can somehow unpick the embroidery work. I think #3 is wool, but the tag is missing. It's black with little flecks of color and two buttons on the neck placket that would probably set me back more than the 75¢ I paid for the whole sweater. All three of these look to be worsted weight or slightly heavier. The last sweater, #4, is sport or fingering weight lambswool. Even with it being a vest, there should be a lot of yarn in it - again it was 50¢. That means that all four sweaters set me back a whopping $2.25 total. [g]
I finished frogging the red ramie & cotton sweater. It went quite well except for one sleeve that seemed to have way too many breaks in the yarn. I'm still slowly working on unraveling the beige, brown & black fair isle from several weeks ago. Never again! I don't care how many pretty colors are in the sweater, trying to take one apart when the colors change every few rows is too time consuming plus the lengths of yarn are short and need to be continually spliced or knotted. I passed up a couple beautiful sweaters yesterday that were made of slubby yarn because I was afraid that they wouldn't unravel without the yarn breaking. I've noticed in the commercially made sweaters that the yarn is more often than not made up of a number of singles that aren't plied together. With the ramie & cotton yarns especially, too hard a tug breaks one of the singles and means another knot. Has anyone tried recycling a sweater made with yarn that has a slub? Any advice would be appreciated. If either of the sweaters had been under $1 I would have taken a chance, but at $2 & $3, I didn't want to experiment.
The top one is a 80% acrylic, 20% wool in an oatmeal color with blue & rust flecks for 50¢. If it looks a bit funny, it's because it's half frogged - I forgot to take a "before" photo. #2 is a 100% cotton, XL, another 50¢ find. It has navy blue & red stripes across the chest, and the main color is charcoal grey. The first navy blue stripe on the front has the little polo figure embroidered on, so I'll probably lose most of the yarn for about 8 or 10 rows unless I can somehow unpick the embroidery work. I think #3 is wool, but the tag is missing. It's black with little flecks of color and two buttons on the neck placket that would probably set me back more than the 75¢ I paid for the whole sweater. All three of these look to be worsted weight or slightly heavier. The last sweater, #4, is sport or fingering weight lambswool. Even with it being a vest, there should be a lot of yarn in it - again it was 50¢. That means that all four sweaters set me back a whopping $2.25 total. [g]
I finished frogging the red ramie & cotton sweater. It went quite well except for one sleeve that seemed to have way too many breaks in the yarn. I'm still slowly working on unraveling the beige, brown & black fair isle from several weeks ago. Never again! I don't care how many pretty colors are in the sweater, trying to take one apart when the colors change every few rows is too time consuming plus the lengths of yarn are short and need to be continually spliced or knotted. I passed up a couple beautiful sweaters yesterday that were made of slubby yarn because I was afraid that they wouldn't unravel without the yarn breaking. I've noticed in the commercially made sweaters that the yarn is more often than not made up of a number of singles that aren't plied together. With the ramie & cotton yarns especially, too hard a tug breaks one of the singles and means another knot. Has anyone tried recycling a sweater made with yarn that has a slub? Any advice would be appreciated. If either of the sweaters had been under $1 I would have taken a chance, but at $2 & $3, I didn't want to experiment.
posted by Plain Jane | 2:09 PM
2 Comments:
Wowee! You sure are stocking up aren't ya? What are you going to make with all your new-found yarns? Or, are you going to stash it?
Great finds! You're a lucky garage-saler!
Single ply yarns break easily. Or rather, they sort of unravel themselves, it's weird. But some slubby yarns are quite strong. A three dollar experiment does not sound bad to me, but if it doesn't work, what would you do with the half-ripped sweater? Maybe felt it and make potholders?
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