Here’s my latest creation. Made from 100% recycled cotton yarn. It’s my own design. I’m not happy with the collar being off kilter and sleeve edges flaring out. This is fixable, but is it worth it?
I want to enter it in the county fair and think I might be better off starting over.
I took it out to play with it while I waited for an update on my laptop and a pin is missing from the round one. So I played with the square one and made my first loom flower (Pictured here after my 5-year-old had his way with it). I’m hooked, as they say.
UPDATE: Here’s my second loom flower attempted on the right, made with square loom. Used contrasting yarn on the smaller posts, then turning. Twisted each petal 3 turns and stitched to back loops for a twisted look. Mucho Better-o!
Check out some of the loom flowers I found online on my Pinterest board (shown in the left sidebar).
So, now i’m obsessed with making and using looms. Will probably do it DIY from plastic canvas circles like those below. If I get a package of the largest circle, I can cut them down to size for several different looms, or…
I will try one of these…there are a few different loom options but I like the ones with several posts best.
I have to admit, I can’t really figure out how that last one even works! What type of loom do you like best? Have you used any of these? Which one would you recommend? Thanks for your input fellow knitters!
I have an awesome batch of yarn rescued from a yard sale starting Friday (2/22) morning. Click eBay preview below to go to the rewindyard store.
Yes, I’ve had my eye on an iPad, but can’t come up with a reason I really need it. I’m also eyeballing a kindle and nook, but alas couldn’t justify the expense. Here are five good reasons I can think of. It never occurred to me that I could get my patterns on a kindle!
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1. Sexy Vintage Dress |
2. Cutest Doggie Hat Ever | 3. As if They Weren’t Cute Enough! | 4. Can You Say Inspiration? | 5. Some Things Just Always Work |
This project was fast and easy. It’s this God-awful orange because the kids have a tree-frog shower curtain I was looking to match. Each piece is done in stockinette with seed stitch borders to stop it from curling at the edges. The original yarn was DK and came in two strands. I separated them using my most awesome ball winder and a great deal of patience. You might prefer starting with a sport weight yarn. Sock weight might work too.
The fiber content is 50% Cotton, 50% Acrylic. I would definitely recommend this blend for anyone making bath linens. It is super soft and absorbent, but unlike pure cotton, it doesn’t harden and become rough when you let it air dry. The washcloth is just as soft after air drying as it was coming from the dryer!
I used 8 strands of yarn and size 13 needles to cast on 45 stitches. I cast on a little differently. I used a rug hook to single crochet 50 stitches, then pick up one stitch on the back loop of each single crochet. I then worked in stockinette for 40 rows. After binding that off, I took 2 strands to make the seed stitch, picking up 50 stitches across the top and 32 along the sides.
Each side was worked in miter stitch, increasing each side by one stitch every third row. I joined as I stitched so I only had one corder to sew up at the end. If you have a hard time with this edging, just work it straight across on the two ends and then the top and bottom.
The hand towel and face cloth were knitting up quickly with my sweater machine and 1 strand of yarn. I cast on the sweater machine very much the same way I cast on other knits. I crochet around the machine hooks so that the back loop is facing up.
Once off the sweater machine, I worked seed stitch with 1 strand, the same way I did for the floor mat.
Would you believe that the toddler said he didn’t like it (the little s**t!)? He wanted it white or to have a picture of a frog. He thought I was favoring the big brother by using his favorite color, which is of course, orange. The compromise…I agreed to figure out a way to put a cartoon frog face on each one for him…ah, the things we do for our kids…
Here are some cute ideas:
I wasn’t entirely happy with that last creation. The gauge was too big and the blanket itself was gi-normous for a little baby. I re-made it, replacing lavender with blue. I’m much happier, but I see now that it looks like a tribute to Windows! Here’s the second generation of this blanket. Same yarn used for the last, so it only cost me the blue sweater for yarn, a couple of bucks, maybe $2.50? 100% cotton, awesome colors!
I made this four-square baby blanket with my sweater machine and the cotton yarn from four different sweaters. It’s a simple knit with a cable twist in the center of each square. The border is crochet, hdc row 1, sc row 2 for each color. I think the colors go together beautifully. Cost of the yarn: $10. Cost if I bought retail, it would have been at least $100 going for the must affordable yarn, Sugar n Cream brand.
The blanket came out much larger than I intended. I’m going to be trying it again with the yarn I have left. That means, I’d get two blankets out of that $10 instead of spending $200 or more!
Check out the baby blanket I made with 100% recycled yarn. The pink is Ambercrombie, the cream is Gap and the brown is acrylic (hey, you use what you can get your hands on). The pink and cream colors are 100% cotton and 50/50 cotton acrylic blend respectively.
I don’t know a single yarn junkie who doesn’t rely on a ball winder to support their habit. But the ball winder is good for more than just getting your yarn into neat, portable, easy to handle skeins. It’s also good for adding twist to yarn. This is how you do it.
If you are separating a thicker yarn into thinner strands, you can use the ball winder within one section of the yarn and hand wind the other to end up with two separate skeins, or your can invest in two ball winders if you are ambidextrous to wind them both at the same time. Sometimes you may want to add twist from frogged cotton, since it tends to lose twist as you work with it. Here are two skeins, one with twist added after frogging and the other left as it came off the sweater:
See how the twist makes a tighter, rounder strand on the right skein? Here’s how you do it:
First you need to see what direction your yarn is twisting from. The chart in the upper left shows the difference between an S twist and a Z twist. You will take the pull skein you have and rewind it on the ball winder again. Attach the center pull strand to the ball winder. If you are looking to add S twist, you need to turn the crank clockwise. If you want to undo and S twist or to increase the twist in a Z twist, you will turn the crank counterclockwise. I ran the yarn through the winder 4 times to get the level of twist shown in this photo.
This technique can also be applied to combining yarns. When you put two strands together, both need to twist in the same direction. To then get them to hold well together, you need to twist the two together in the opposite direction. Thank means, if you have two strands in an S twist, you need to wind them onto the ball winder cranking in a counterclockwise direction. (Spinners, please correct me if I’m wrong…this is the technique I was taught, but it was a while ago).
I cannot live without my ball winder. If you don’t have one yet, consider some of these options below. Just be sure you get one that does not enter yarn from the side (sometimes called in-line). The products below will work for adding twist to yarn.
This one gets a pretty good user rating, but I have never used it before. If you have, let us know by a comment on this post.
This is the one I use. I just love it! Royal makes a really good winder.
This is an expensive winder. I drool over it often. Maybe someday Rewind Yarn will pay off enough for me to buy one!
I don’t trust the cheap price tag on this one. There’s no user rating. My past experience with winders in this price range is not good, but I wanted to include a low-price option. If you have had success with this winder, please let us know via the comments box. Thanks!
I know another daycare mom named Heather who I hit it off with right away. She is just a fun, easy-going and pleasant person to be around. So when our boys were graduating at their respective classes at preschool together, we sat next to each other. That’s how I met her mother, Sharon. It just so turns out that Sharon is a spinner and even raises her own Llama and Alpaca! Heather and I wondered how we could have talked so much and yarn never came up. How was that possible?
So of course, we talked yarn for the next hour or so and I realized there are really two different worlds when it comes to yarn. There are the artists who spin their own yarn, hand paint it, and produce one of a kind creations of great value. Then there are those of us for whom the cost of such yarn is out of reach. We’re more practically minded. We just want to find yarn better than acrylic for a workable price to make winter garments for our kids. It’s sort of like the difference between an owner’s manual and a classic novel.
For a moment, it seemed the idea of taking apart garments to reuse the yarn might conflict with the ideals of this more artistic side of yarn. After all, Rewind is about saving money and those high-end yarns are often too expensive for many of us. Then I realized that the type of yarns used in garments with custom, hand-produced yarns are not going to be the kind we recycle. You won’t find alpaca in the Salvation Army store. You rarely find hand-made items at all. We’re not destroying works of art to reuse the yarn, nor would I ever condone that.
I don’t think our recycling is detracting from the work of yarn artists. We would never be able to afford that yarn anyway. What we do here is find the kind of yarn that is mass-produced in retail markets for at a fraction of the retail cost. I think I’m okay with that.
Plus, the types of patterns that work well for recycled yarn make good small projects as well. This makes hand-spun yarn accessible for everyone by only requiring the more-affordable smaller lots. And you never know…some of the mass-produced yarns may help artists expand their creations. They may be able to find recycled cashmere to blend with their alpaca or unbleached cotton to dye or paint by hand. These are ways that Rewind techniques can benefit the higher-art of hand-made yarns.
Today we’re going to get into semantics. There are so many names being tossed around the web for giving materials a second life, you may be confused about what exactly each term means. I know I was when I tried to determine how I should list my yarn. I mean, is it recycled, reclaimed, reused or upcycled? What’s the difference?
Recycling is the process of taking used items, breaking them down and then reconstituting the materials into new products. This prevents wasting materials that may still have useful purposes, keeps junk out of landfills and reduces pollution. In the strictest sense of the term, the waste material is broken down and reprocessed to produce a fresh supply of the same original item.
Reclaimed items are recovered from the trash. The items are restored to like-new condition for re-use.
Reusing an item is simply the practice of using an item, in its original form, more than once. When you refill a water bottle, you are reusing it. You may also reuse the bottle for other purposes, like cutting in half and using as a planter or using in the original form, stacked with many, others as insulation in an eco-home.
Upcycling is a newer, trendier term in the green movement. This means taking otherwise unusable items and creating a new use for them. The intent is to create a high-quality, artistic product. You see a lot of this type of thing at Uncommon Goods. Jewelry, flower vases, home décor items and other gift-type items are hand produced from recycled materials and sold on the retail market.
So the yarn here does not really fit into any of these categories, but I believe recycled is the most appropriate term. It’s either that, or we have to make a new category for breaking down items into their raw materials so the materials may be reused. Shall we say Deconstructed?
Designers may use the deconstructed yarn to produce upcycled items. That’s what I do when I use it to knit up one of my designs. But truly recycled yarn is chopped up and reprocessed by large factories, something I believe wastes energy unnecessarily. The yarn here is recycled through human energy alone.
When I use the term reclaimed, I may have gotten it from the trash, but most likely from a place where it would have ended up in the trash had I not come along.
Another fabulous frogger, Dawn Prickett, beat me to creating the most comprehensive tutorial on frogging anywhere. Her tutorial is so great, I’m posting a link to it below:
Be sure to look around her Etsy shop too, the Twice Sheared Sheep.
I had a nice conversation with fellow frogger Jean in Washington state. She frogs thrift store sweaters too. She uses some of the yarn for herself and gives a lot away to charitable organizations like her mother’s church group for knitting into prayer shawls. She gets a very good deal at her local St. Vincent De Paul and Value Village second hand stores for $.99 or $.50. I don’t get quite as good a deal as that, the best I do is $1 to $2.49. Of course I’m in Massachusetts where everything is more expensive.
We both marveled at how a lot of people never learn how to frog yarn, or are intimidated by the process. But when you know how to do it right, it’s not so hard. It’s about picking the right kind of sweater and knowing the short cuts.
The article below comes from eBay power seller, Suzanne Arant-Wells, courtesy of Ezine Articles.
When browsing thrift sweaters, you will quickly gain the skills to identify fiber types by look and feel, but in the beginning, you have to spend a lot of time looking at tags. After a while, you learn to sort out the acrylic and other manmade fibers and just check the tags of those that look promising. Here’s a breakdown of the types of yarn you might find and some advice on frogging them.
The term “frogging” yarn may sound funny to you, but it’s a way to recycle old clothes and use the yarn for something new. As concerns about global warming become greater, people everywhere are thinking of better ways to recycle, reuse and renew. Frogging presents the perfect way to recycle used sweaters, yielding enough yarn to make a new sweater. Yarn can be used for a variety of small projects and some knitters will take the yarn from several sweaters to make one larger project. Any project that can be made with new store-bought yarn can be made much more cheaply with recycled yarn.
Hello fellow froggers!
I’m taking another tack with the site. I got so far behind I caught up with winding in one red-eyed night an now need to blow this stuff out fast. I still think we are moving, but I can’t be sure exactly when and I don’t want to be holding this inventory for a move. We’ve got enough crap in this house as it is.
So…There is now an eBay site for RewindYarn where I’ll be blowing this stuff out over the next few days to a week. I’ll be posting as I find time and putting a one-week time limit on the auctions with a Buy Now price added on.
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Some crafters prefer their recycled yarn to be straightened before they use it. This way, they can see what the finished product will look like as they knit. Those who knit with un-straightened yarn will notice a slight wave in the stitches, but this is easily removed the first time the project is washed. I offer straighten yarn, dried here in the fresh Cape Cod air. It will cost you a little more, but the smell of the fresh ocean air in the yarn will make it worth the extra money.
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Is anyone else drowning in yarn?!?! | |
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Some crafters prefer their recycled yarn to be straightened before they use it. This way, they can see what the finished product will look like as they knit. Those who knit with un-straightened yarn will notice a slight wave in the stitches, but this is easily removed the first time the project is washed.
You can either purchase the sweaters on this site for $1.99 – $2.49, or get the recycled yarn for $11.99 – $19.99. If you would like your yarn straightened and dried in the fresh Cape Cod air we have here, the total cost is $24.99 – $32.99.
I found so many great sweaters today, it took me most of the after noon to post them all! |
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Some crafters prefer their recycled yarn to be straightened before they use it. This way, they can see what the finished product will look like as they knit. Those who knit with un-straightened yarn will notice a slight wave in the stitches, but this is easily removed the first time the project is washed.
You can either purchase the sweaters on this site for $1.99 – $2.49, or get the recycled yarn for $11.99 – $12.49. If you would like your yarn straightened and dried in the fresh Cape Cod air we have here, the total cost is $24.99 – $27.99.
A trip to the Salvation Army yesterday yielded some good frogging and felting finds. I was in such a rush, two of my picks turned out to be not so good for frogging and ended up on eBay straight away. If you want to take a peek, you can see them here and here. The rest are here for your perusal until Sunday when they’ll go up for bidding. Take a look at the beauties below and click on the images if you want to learn more!
All Rewind yarns come from gently used sweaters purchased from the Salvation Army. The sweaters are carefully washed and dried before they are unraveled. They are then wound into center-pull skeins. These skeins are superior to those you find in stores because they stay put while you knit and are much less prone to tangling.
Some crafters prefer their recycled yarn to be straightened before they use it. This way, they can see what the finished product will look like as they knit. Those who knit with un-straightened yarn will notice a slight wave in the stitches, but this is easily removed the first time the project is washed.
You can either purchase the sweaters on this site for $1.99 – $2.49, or get the recycled yarn for $11.99 – $12.49. If you would like your yarn straightened and dried in the fresh Cape Cod air we have here, the total cost is $24.99 – $27.99.
Elegant, mod and just plain cool. Love the stuff Max Melody is putting out!
