Recycling

Nearly 20 years ago now I was staying in the village of Ambleside, in the Lake District, when I found  a little wool shop, now sadly defunct. It had some lovely, natural grey-brown Blue-Faced Leicester in an aran weight, and I bought some to make this sweater (the one on the right):

Well, twenty  years ago it was pretty fashionable ;)

I started knitting the sweater and I finished the back. Then I stopped knitting for a while and it was five years later, if I remember correctly, that I picked it up again and knitted the front and one sleeve. I started the second sleeve - disaster! I ran out of yarn. After some searching on the internet (no Ravelry in those days) I found a supplier of the same brand of yarn, but they did not have the same colour. They sent me a shade card and I chose a contrasting yarn which I used to make stripes on the remaining sleeve, the collar and sew up the sweater. What was I thinking of!

Well, it didn't look great, and I was not very careful about finishing in those days either, and the collar didn't lie properly and the sweater was very very heavy and really too warm, and, long story short, I never wore it.

I recently found it at the back of the wardrobe and I knew I was never going to wear it, but I still loved the yarn so I decided to unravel it and recycle the yarn.

I got started last weekend. Here's the sweater after I had removed the collar and the first sleeve. You can see how bad the striped sleeve looks. Plus there is a mistake in the front left cable.

I skeined up the yarn from the collar and the first sleeve using my niddy noddy and it looked like this!

Like poodle wool and incredibly sproingy.

The next step is to continue unravelling the sweater and to soak and dry the skeins. Once they are all processed then I have to decide what to make with them. Something I have noticed as I have been unravelling is that the yarn is quite soft and has a halo. I don't think it is ideally suited to cables as it softens them and they don't pop as much as they should.

One possible use for the yarn is to make a Girasole Blanket. I've wanted to make one of these for a long time. I think it would be soft and warm and would show off the yarn beautifully. On the other hand I still have a yearning to make it into something I can wear.
To be continued...