Monday, December 4th, 2006
… I mean, I don’t have any yarn in quite this color. That’s reason enough to bring it home, right?
That said, this is some of the silkiest, shiniest alpaca yarn I have ever seen. It’s got bloom, sure, but it doesn’t look or feel hairy like most alpaca. It’s sleek, it’s the color of dark chocolate, and it’s beautiful.
Pictures from our field trip will appear as soon as Sarah finds out how to get the photos from her Treo without using Bluetooth. (I have a Mac with built-in Bluetooth, so for me, retrieving data from phones like that is effortless. Yet another reason to go Mac and never switch back: features you didn’t know you needed become essential.)
Wednesday, October 25th, 2006
I’ve found a way to turn old t-shirts into yarn! I am all impressed with how cool I am.
It involves cutting the shirt into one very, very long spiral with a rotary cutter. I end up with a fabric that is … um, so far? Not perfect. It’s cottony, it’s stretchy and squishy, but it’s not very soft. I believe it’s because cotton itself just isn’t very soft. Cotton is smooth, but it’s not really soft the way a fuzzy fiber is.
The boyfriend and a friend were all impressed with the look of the fabric and with my technique, but they announced that the material is a little rough. Justin said he wouldn’t wear it as a hat, but he’d definitely wear it as a scarf. Sonya said that it was too rough to wear right on the skin as a scarf, but it would definitely make a great hat. I appreciate their recommendations and will definitely do what I normally do when given conflicting advice: ignore it in favor of further experimentation. I’m quite happy with the way it looks on size 13s: relatively even, and a freakin’ giant three stitches to the inch. After all the time it takes to convert it to yarn, it better knit up fast or I’ll end up spending my whole freaking life working on this stuff.
Fortunately, the same process works with all pullover-style shirts and sweaters. I’m going to apply the same technique to two Salvation Army sweaters I intentionally felted. One’s a much-loved and much-darned wool-angora blend, and the other one is an incredibly fluffy, squishy off-white cashmere pullover with a couple of unforgivable holes in it.
