Unraveling and Recycling Sweater Yarn
Posted: Friday, March 14th, 2008
I have had a lot of people looking at my posts about felted sweater crafting, and realize that I should include a post about recycling the actual wool sweater for the yarn. Quality wool yarn is pretty expensive, but if one were to buy a nice wool sweater at the thrift store for about $7 and unravel it you could potentially get about 2 pounds of yarn which would cost almost $80 new at the yarn stores. (I’m basing that on a 3.5oz. skein of Irish wool yarn I bought recently for $9.50.) Taking that into account, a thrift smart person who loves yarn crafting could buy their yarn for a fraction of the retail price while using materials that have already had a life and ended up at the thrift store ready to be used again and again. Buying new yarn or new anything is fun and gives us all some sense of satisfaction, but buying lots of new stuff is just exacerbating the problem of consumerism and the overuse of the world’s energy and natural resources. Buying used stuff keeps things in circulation and makes much better use of our natural resources.
Back to recycling yarn, I have found some web resources for you to check out about how to unravel sweaters, what kind of sweaters to look for, and how to clean and make your yarn into a brand new usable skein. It takes some time to unravel a sweater, but if you try it once you will realize how much of a savings it is and how much fun it is!
http://www.az.com/~andrade/knit/thrifty.html
http://www.neauveau.com/recycledyarn.html
http://www.diynetwork.com/diy/na_knitting/article/0,,DIY_14141_3178487,00.html