These are stitch markers that I have made. You can use them to mark places on your knitting needles, more deluxe versions can be left inside the knitting project and removed later.
You can make your own very easily with a few jewelry making supplies and beads. Here is one tutorial that I used in making my stitch markers.
I will be adding my own tutorial for creating stitch markers once I have experimented more.
Above is the amount of yarn I got from unraveling the sweater in the last post, minus one skein of pink which I couldn’t help myself from dyeing, hence it is not in this shot. The total was three skeins of 260-290 yards, two skeins of 205 yards, and one pink skein of 200 yards. Around 1386 yards in total, plus or minus rounding errors. Six balls of yarn for $6.77, $1.13 each skein. That’s a great price!
Sadly I did not take any pictures while I deconstructed the sweater. I will go out and get another sweater soon (luck willing) to make up for this. Once you’ve done it once, it’s very easy to do it again, I’m sure anyone could figure it out as I did. That said, this blog is all about sharing knowledge, so I’ll be posting a tutorial on deconstructing a sweater in the coming week or two.
Sometimes I get the urge to dye, but I don’t want to dye my handspun, and I don’t have a stash of yarn yet. When these times occur, I head out to the thrift store (in my case, Value Village) and look around to see what sweaters they have. I keep my eye out for any labels that have wool/angora/cashmere/etc.
The sweater pictured above cost me $6CDN. It is 90% lambswool, 8% wool, 2% angora rabbit. I will probably get six skeins of wool from it, one for all the pink, one for each sleeve and the back and front, and one small one for the cuffs and trim. It’s so soft!
This is my second sweater I am deconstructing. The first one was a less nice wool, 60% wool/40% acrylic, but it provided me with just under 1200 yards of 2 and 3 ply, and dyed surprisingly nicely:
