Friday, November 23, 2012

Yarn: Reclaimed step by step

Remember my frog pond? Well, it's all been frogged. And then some!

It was really interesting taking apart sweaters, particularly from early on in my knitting career when I had no idea what I was doing. Tying in the ends? That's not how we do things any more. Then again, splicing together yarn results in some enormous hanks of yarn.... Anyway.

Step one: Unweave your ends. Curse your younger self who inexplicably tied the ends to the knitting. Or who split through single ply yarn when weaving.

Step two: Unseam your seams.

Step three: Frog! Wind into a ball. This will create a lot of fiber dust that gets in your nose and makes you sneeze.

Step four: Skein. I used my handy dandy niddy noddy and skeined up all the yarn. This was surprisingly tiring for my arm and shoulder. I tied off the hanks using scraps of sock yarn.
Processing frogged yarn

Step five: Soak the skeins.
Processing frogged yarn
With a little wool wash.

Processing frogged yarn
In a rubbermaid tub. Black and red went first.

Processing frogged yarn
Then the blue. It looked like Smurf ramen, frankly.

Step six: Wring out the skeins.Get out that water!
Processing frogged yarn
Spot the cat? Wringing out the skeins took a lot of time. Like, a lot of time.

Processing frogged yarn
Cat's easier to find on this one.

Step seven: Hang skeins to dry.
Processing frogged yarn
Batch #1.

Processing frogged yarn
All the yarn. Be annoyed that cat destroyed collapsing fabric box...

Step eight: Wait for skeins to dry. Wait some more. Give it another day.

Step nine: Call it dry enough and retwist all the skeins. Realize that you don't have space to store all this yarn...
Reclaimed yarn

Seriously, this is a lot of yarn. There's also a few un-washed balls of reclaimed yarn that I may not bother with processing. We'll see.

The process worked pretty well. Some of the yarn still has a little wave to it, some looks brand new. The red yarn is nicer than it ever has been. It was a lot of work, but I'm glad I did it. Now I need to knit some worsted/aran/bulky weight sweaters to decrease this reclaimed stash!