Do you recycle ramie sweaters?

I have misgivings about ramie, but I found a sweater that was 40% silk, 30% nylon, 15% ramie, 11% wool, and 4% other fiber, and I decided to buy it. It was a quarter, so I would not be out much money if it didn't work out.

I found it reasonably easy to take apart and unravel, but I did not like the feel of the ramie. It was dusty and the texture reminds me of soft paper. Even with only 15% ramie, I could feel it was in there.

Since I am not attached to this yarn, I thought it would be fun to blotch it with McCormick Neon purple and blue. The yarn itself is a striped gray tweed. I'm hoping this will be fun to weave into scarves with the colors appearing at random throughout the work.
I will probably avoid ramie in any quantity from here on out. I just don't like it. The texture reminds me of the feel of an old wadded up unused tissue that has spent the winter in your coat pocket. Soft, yet dusty and vaguely unpleasant. It's not my thing for knitting or weaving.

Have you ever taken apart ramie sweaters for the yarn or re-purposed them in some other way? What did you make with the sweater? There are tons of these sweaters around, and if there is a project for them, I might reconsider my stance on ramie.

Chenille on the Wheel

Hi folks,

This blog has been dormant for a very, very long time, but I have been crafting. I will not really have time to post about all the things I have learned until this fall, but I will get in here from time to time this summer.

Since I last showed up here, I have taken up weaving and spinning with all the zeal of a new convert. I don't have a lot of money, and I like the concept of recycling whenever I can, so I will be posting about making "new" yarn from old yarns in the coming months.

Today's effort is a chenille yarn made from 2 plies of recycled thrift shop sweaters. It's acrylic, and I'm making it for weaving into scarves on my Schacht Cricket loom.

I wasn't sure what to expect, so I started out with the sweater I liked the least from my thrift shop haul, and got this yarn as an end result. I'll edit in the wpi later.

On the niddy noddy, before setting the twist
Balls before plying.
On the Babe Production wheel.
I have not used Blogger in so long that I accidentally uploaded my pictures in the wrong order. Whoops. :)

So far, I'm pretty happy with this yarn. I don't know if I would knit with it, but my goal was to make a weaving yarn. I believe I could use this yarn right from the sweaters without plying it, and use the 12-dent heddle I bought separately, but a lot of us only have the 8-dent heddle that comes with the loom. By plying this yarn, I now have a thick enough yarn to use with the 8-dent. I have been reading that chenille yarns need to be woven fairly tightly to prevent "worming" in the finished piece.

I'll keep experimenting and posting my results. For now, I will continue to be semi-random in my posting habits, but soon you will see more from me. Look for a lot more posting activity from September on.

Mom, can I have some more of those screaming alien heads?

I love it when something mundane turns out to be unintentionally funny, it changes the course of my day for the better.

I have a nine year old boy who never eats. He's growing, but I don't know how. I was the same type of child. If I could find a way to hide things on my plate to make it look like I'd eaten them, I would. He is me all over again.

We shop at Big Lots whenever we can. A lot of stuff that ends up at Big Lots is discontinued products or various oddball things. I found some elbow macaroni that are pinched closed on one end, and open on the other, and since they were made in Italy and priced under a buck, they landed in my cart. Pasta that little guys can easily get on a fork is always welcome in our home.

Last night I was dog-tired and disinclined to spend much time in the kitchen, so I went for the pasta. When I opened up the bag and dumped it into the pot, I noted again that they were odd-looking, but I was when I spooned one out of the pot to test it for done-ness that I burst out laughing. The pasta had puffed up into a little screamy-face, like these guys:

The sauce I used with these was rather thin and unremarkable, and didn't look very appealing.
But when I showed the meal my nine year old, he said "Cool! Screaming alien heads!" He cleaned his plate and asked for seconds. That never happens, ever.

This blog post is silly, but alien head pasta wrought an unexpected miracle at the dinner table, and I wish I had bought more.

Some old sweater recons, in time for the cold weather

I actually made these last winter, and I fully intend to make more this year. Due to my sketchy blogging track record, I might not blog about them until July! So here are a couple of basic sweaters I made for my youngest. He was not a cooperative model, but I got him to stay in one area, looking out at the snow, long enough to get in a few blurry shots.

I noticed that many of the old acrylic sweaters in my pile to go to the thrift store were serged together. I had just downloaded some Kwik Sew toddler shirt patterns at that time, so I thought that turning my old sweaters into something warm for the little guy would be a great way to use them. I live quite far from any real fabric stores, and runs down to Joplin for supplies are few and far between.

The lighter blue sweater is made from Kwik Sew 3149

http://www.kwiksew.com/Catalog/cat_detail.cfm?pid=3149&Cat=Children&Level=Toddlers&QL=Toddlers

I used the turtleneck collar from the pattern, and made it from the big piece of back section left over after cutting out the front, back and sleeves.
I placed the pattern pieces so that I could use the existing ribbing. No hemming needed to reconstruct this sweater. Awesome!
The seam on the collar was centered in the back. I did not center it perfectly, but maybe next time. This sort of knit creeps a little while sewing on an older serger. I just got a new one with a differential feed, and I think that will help. No matter, it's not that noticeable unless I point it out.

The darker blue sweater with the patterned areas needed to have some wrist cuffs added. I just cut them out of some scraps left from the original sweater, when I cut out the collar. I had to do this so that the design would line up the way I wanted it to. It's very easy to add cuffs with a serger.

The dark blue was made with 2918 view B
http://www.kwiksew.com/Catalog/cat_detail.cfm?pid=2918&Cat=Children&Level=Toddlers&QL=Toddlers
This was not difficult, and the sweaters you see here have been washed many, many times and are holding up quite well. When I first made these, I was afraid they would not last, but they are tough enough for an active three year old.

This is a great project if you have too many grownup sweaters. It's also environmentally friendly and very inexpensive. You can use thrifted sweaters, or mix together a few sweaters into a new creation as long as they all have similar washing instructions.

Rooting fresh basil from the grocery store

About three weeks before Christmas, I was in the produce aisle at my local store, and I got to thinking that basil might root easily in water, like the pothos plants that I had just finished potting up. I found a package of nice-looking leaves with a good date on them, took them home, and put them in a vase near a window.

Three weeks later, they had enough roots that I felt I could transplant them into a pot. They seem to be happy enough, considering that they need more light than I can give them at the moment.

So far, so good. They smell heavenly and are a good antidote to the dead of winter. Next time you go shopping, pick up some sprigs of basil and give it a try.

Experiment with craft felt, acrylic paints, and rubbing alcohol

I have a large supply of felt in drab colors or colors I simply don't like, and thought I would see what happens when the felt is painted. This is synthetic craft felt, the cheap stuff. I saturated it, then did a color wash with some very old acrylic paints that I wanted to de-stash. For fun, I took a dropper and added a bit if rubbing alcohol to the wet paint. They took forever to dry, but here are the results.

The fabric is stiff, as one would expect, but not so stiff that I can't sew it. I'm not sure what I am going to make with them yet, maybe brooches or something. When I make it, I'll post it on the blog. Thanks for looking!

Hobby Lobby I Love This Yarn Hot Stripe #792, better than potato chips

I'm trying to eat less and craft more this year, but in the evenings, which are my munching downfall, I'm too tired to take on anything challenging. So I'm whipping up some basic garter stitch scarves. If visitors come to my house and look cold, they may go home with a scarf to keep the chill off. I'm really liking striping yarns and will probably not rest till I've tried them all. I wanted to knit more of this one before taking a pic, but the daylight was fast disappearing. Anyhow, you get the idea what this yarn does from the above image.

This yarn is so much nicer than Red Heart! The price is slightly higher that Red Heart, but comparable. The skeins are also a little shorter, so buy more than you think you'll need.

I am not wild about this colorway as an accessory, but at least it isn't boring. There's nothing wrong with these colors. I'm just remembering that they (except the blue) could be found in 1970's kitchens, and I'm old enough to remember those vividly. But it's growing on me, as is this yarn.

I Love This Yarn is softer and springier, and less likely to split than Red Heart. Definitely an improvement. And a skein costs less than a bag of Doritos. Maybe I will lose some weight this winter! I'm going to try.

I'll show you what some other striping yarns look like this week. I bought a few of them to get me through the latest cold snap.