8 Sweaters For 4 Bucks Equals A Lot Of Recycled Yarn For Cheap
One thing I've always wanted to try since reading about it somewhere online a year or two ago is recycling sweaters to get the yarn from them. Yesterday I was out shopping and ventured into the salvation army store and they had a whole rack full of sweaters they were selling for 50 cents. I grabbed 8 of them. You really can't tell what colors they are in this picture and I didn't intend to show them off up close. I just wanted to brag about the deal I got. I will say that one of the sweaters is made from a beautiful black chenille type yarn and a couple of the sweaters are tweeds... and I like tweed yarn. Most of them are acrylic, but they are super soft and a couple of them are cotton I think. One of the tweed sweaters may be wool yarn but I can't tell because it doesn't have a label on it, but it feels kinda scratchy and thats why I think it's wool. I don't have a lot of experience touching wool yarn, but I've heard that some wool can feel scratchy like that. Later on this year I'll show them off a little better when I start attempting to take them apart. I figure that if I'm successful at recycling these then I should get a couple of thousand yards of yarn out of all these. I chose sweaters in colors that would be very suitable for men's scarves that I hope to be able to get started on knitting by next winter. For now these sweaters are going into storage until I finish the prayer shawls I'm working on.
posted by David at 5:44 AM
7 Comments:
I can't wait to see how it turns out. I've wanted to try recycling old sweaters for some time now. Good luck with it!
I can't wait to get started on them, but it's going to be awhile. I've got some other projects going and don't want to get too far ahead of myself if you know what I mean lol.
OOOOOO score!!!!!!!!!
I love the thrift store...
infact you have inspired me to rip up some that have been waiting for me to notice them...
and then of course I'll have to break out the Koolaid and dye them..
;0)
Moon
Take the sweater you think may be wool, snip off a bit of it and light it with a match or lighter. If it burns it's a natural fiber. If it melts, it's acrylic.
Great deal you scored! Happy unraveling :-)
Jaye I never would have thought to do that. Thanks for sharing that tip. I'll remember to do that when I start unraveling the sweater.
Although if it's wool it won't burn very well because wool is a natural flame retardant and will probably go out a lot, but it will smell like burning hair and the ash it leaves will be filmy/oily when you rub it. Cotton will burn like paper, silk burns kinda like cotton but smells more like burning hair, but both leave behind very light, papery ash. Any of the cellulose-based synthetic fibers (rayon, tencel, modal, etc.) will smell like burning paper and burn very quickly like the cotton (but faster). All the oleo-based synthetic fibers will melt and make an awful stink of burning plastic.
Yes, I love recycling sweaters too. But I only look for wool sweaters, and ones that really should never have been knit in the first place! You may have seen my story last year. I examine the seams to see that they are knit in pieces rather than cut from sheets, with serged seams. You'll find out why later! haha
You can do the burn test to determine the fibre content of yarns. They are pretty reliable, if you do it often enough to distinguish the odours, and residue left. You can try putting a snip of the yarn into a spoonful of chlorine bleach, and see what happens. If it is wool, or silk, it will disappear in a few minutes. Cotton will dissolve too, but synthetics just sit there. That is why you never bleach wool with chlorine and cotton will disintegrate over time with bleaching.
And who is going around telling you that wool is scratchy?? You need to touch some quality fibres!!
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