"Dead" Sweaters

When I recycle a sweater I've bought from Goodwill, I call it a dead sweater. I've recently killed three sweaters I bought for about $16 at a Goodwill in Delaware when I lived there last year. I ended up with 1356 yards of DK-ish weight light blue cotton, 1006 yards of a 50/50 mohair/acrylic blend, and 1186 yards of a worsted-ish weight lovely tweedy brown 100% wool.

Here is the wool. I wasn't terribly intelligent and skeined this thing almost whole. 988 yards in that monster skein. 198 in the little one, when I realized that I forgot a sleeve afterward!

This was a really poorly designed sweater, with a cable running down the front of it. See the cable? Yeah, me niether. So I rescued ove 1000 yards of mohair from it, and we'll see what it becomes later.

It's not quite laceweight mohair, but I have absolutely no idea what to do with it. Suggestions? I may make a scarf with it...but it was somewhat itchy to my skin. I've found that while wools don't bother me at all, mohair does. Maybe I'll try to trade this one. I'd have to get the actual WPI of it though - didn't feel like digging that out while processing it.

This one is also cabled, again, not the best choice of design for the yarn used. Not as bad, but cables in cotton are not as awesome as cables in, say, wool. This is 100% cotton, and while I haven't loved the cotton yarns I've used in the past, it looked pretty promising.

Here it is midway done. I take all the pieces apart, and then, learning from my mistake with the wool one, I skein each piece of the sweater individually for four manageable skeins. I use my niddy noddy to skein. It's really nice, from Nancy's Knit Knacks. It's detatchable and has a nice denim case it lives in. It has a 2 yard long skein length and a 1 yard long one, so you can make your skeins however you want. I generally use the two yard one. Once the yarn is skeined, I write the fiber content, number of yards, and approximate weight on a strip of paper, fold the paper in half and cut a notch on either end of the fold, then fold it around the yarn. It stays pretty well.

And here is the finished product, four lovely skeins of DK-ish soft cotton, ready to be re-used. Well, not completely. None of these is actually ready for use yet. I need to wash them all. Since I've been packing, I didn't want to have to wait until the skeins dried to pack them, and I didn't know where I'd be able to hang them all. Washing them is integral as it gets all the kinks out of the yarn. So I'll have kinky yarn waiting for me in Japan. Awesome.