Category Archives: recycling

March 3, 2013 · 8:37 PM

Even quicker and more practical…

I can’t even really call this a project (unlike my previous one) – take a slightly fulled* sweater (preferably cashmere) chop off the arms and pull them up over your knees and thighs under your pants – done. For the thin-thighed, you might consider attaching them to a garter, sewing in some elastic at the top, or keep shopping at your favorite thrift store until you find the absolute perfect size.

I love the outdoors and I love wool, but I don’t quite love winter yet, though I’m slowing warming to it, all puns aside. I could bring myself to near financial ruin over the fabulous items of clothing made from whisper-thin and oh-so soft-merino wool from brands that rhyme with dicebreaker, fartwool, and especially the one named after a lithe four-legged mammal. Who knew wool underwear, yes, the underpants kind of underwear, are the awesomest things ever in cold or hot weather and dry fast too making them perfect for minimal travel? But alas, I have only purchased a few items here and there and have yet to obtain the perfect woollen base-layer bottoms. I have an older pair that is a little too small in the waist, just enough to cause discomfort and make me grumpy – in ye olden days of corsets and girdles, good god, I would have been grumpy… But I also don’t quite like the pants under pants feeling – part of it is the doubled up waist feeling, and part of is two pieces of fabric occasionally in opposition. This solution is to treat the underparts in segments like an insect. Previously I was just relying on knee-high ski socks and some floppy old woolen men’s trousers, but my knees would get chilled and achy, but these sleeves-turned knee-warmers were the perfect hack.

I am not an exceptional one-legged snowshoer even though it appears that way in these pictures… The gaiters were a recent acquisition too – forget the big-bucks gearhead brands and look at Swiss army surplus – wool and cheap!

*The improper use of fulled vs. felted is driving me bats, but felted is a more often heard term so I’ve got it down here for the sake of keyword searching, but shrunken knitting is fulling dammit!

1 Comment

Filed under recycling

Tagged as arms, cashmere, felted, fulled, gaiters, gear hack, hiking, knee warmer, merino wool, mountain, recycled, recycling, snow, snowshoeing, winter

February 24, 2013 · 1:55 PM

UFOs progess report

My current publicly acknowledged unfinished objects* are closer to being finished. Let’s not talk about the sweater quilt just now, it is my favorite, but sadly banned back to the sack until I feel it’s ok to spend a little money on the backing – I’ve determined it should be a grey cotton jersey sheet, but damned if I can’t find one cheap.

I am tired of the rug. I cut up the t-shirts so slip-shod and sheddy that I constantly sneezed as I braided, and my nose filled with buckets [shrew-sized] of lint – I also realized there are good tightly woven shirts that are best for projects such as this, and lousy loose ones – this is made up of mostly lousy. So I finished with the old balls that I had already cut up, and cut up one additional shirt more since I wanted a little more green in it. Then I remembered how much it sucks to sew these things up, and I can only do about 20 minutes at a time before my fingers are a bloody mess, my hands cramp up, or I’d rather be doing something else. The right needle and thread would make my life easier, but I don’t know quite what those would be, and I don’t want to buy anything, so sewing while wearing kitchen gloves and multiple thimbles is sort of doing the trick at the moment. I’m sure a heavy-duty sewing machine with a zig-zag stitch would work wonders…

(And I think I already mentioned I don’t really like the look of the “country style” home with braided rugs and too much barn red and faded blues… But then we just bought a house which fell through, and then another which also fell through and both could have used a washable rug in one area or another, so I will continue in the hopes that a third house might not actually fall through and it might still be needed, especially for our dog that isn’t ours yet, and might not exist yet either).

And the shirt quilt is trucking along at a slow but steady pace. If I put my mind to it, I could finish the top pretty quickly, but I don’t seem to have any control over my mind at the moment (I mentioned we keep buying houses that fail, right?). I also know I will soon face the dilemma of not having a suitable backing material and possibly not enough for binding, but I have the cotton batting so my future purchase should be limited to just the fabric. It seems that should be easy enough, right? I’d be happy with a solid color or slight pattern – certainly there should be some basic cotton stuff on sale out there somewhere…

Looks like a poster session at a rag-picker’s conference, eh? I get to play-act being a professional again, only at my own conference there are no numbers or words (not that I don’t like words, and I have a healthy respect for numbers) or snooze-inducing power-points and sweaty nervous speakers. Or maybe I am back at a science fair – I won a couple of those once… yeah, that’s right, boost my self-esteem with memories of victories past. These “blocks” aren’t in any permanent order, or even in a decent layout at the moment – I just sew a bunch and then arrange them at the end.

*Yee hah! If you only knew the real count of my unfinished sh*t…**

**I need to know about filters and whatnot – anybody know? I’d hate to think I’d be censored for a “bad” word (godforbid the children!), though I wonder if breast still comes up as something to be censored… hmm… booby titty cans rack jugs dirty pillows.

Thank you Mr. Moth (just this once)

Normally I go on ad nauseam about my utter hatred of the clothes moth but my feelings and fears are shared with anyone who has a love of all things wool, so I won’t this time. This time I must acknowledge my thrill of finding an otherwise perfect cashmere sweater that was banned to the thrift shop for possessing a tiny hole or two, so in a sense I have the moth to thank for my awesome collection of oh-so-soft sweaters. But I could also thank the non-needle inclined [lazy?] person who would discard something so easily fixed (and often in my size)!

But this blazing beauty was one that was eaten beyond any hope of repair:

From a distance, it seems ok, but it isn’t, I couldn’t possibly document every hole, and some were lovingly/desperately stitched closed with a fuchsia thread that actually blended quite well – so much so that I keep finding new repairs I previously overlooked.

But it is a perfect blaze orange, so I gave it a new life as a hiking-during-hunting season hat and mitts ensemble. I was able to unravel a bit of the shoulder cap so that I managed to harvest some perfect mending threads and spent a few hours closing the wounds (some more convincingly than others). But I will cease to unravel any more since it is a pain in ass and fragile as all get out – the remaining scraps will work as mitten linings and quilt squares.

I was sure to keep plenty of mending yarn left!

2 Comments

Filed under recycling, sewing

Tagged as blaze, cashmere, mothdamage, orange, recycling, reuse, sewing

January 13, 2013 · 5:03 PM

A quick and pratical project

Somewhere I saw something like this – maybe exactly like this, at least in terms of application. Cut up an old felted sweater and use it to sit on the cold wet ground… maybe it was someone on Ravelry, Pinterest, Etsy, Flickr, a blog, or, or, or*… oh my, many days I just want to kill my devices. But regardless, I’m not super keen on winter hiking if there is snow or ice involved, but the warming winters are having less of the stuff and making for pleasant and cool outdoor ventures. On a recent hike through the New Jersey Pine Barrens, we found a large plastic bag of “wildlife feed” on the trail and picked it up to dispose of it properly. I don’t know what wildlife it was intended to feed, or if there is a one-beast-fit-all kibble, but the dregs were a disturbing fleshy liverish color, so maybe it was a modern Soylent Green for the Jersey Devils. The bag had a phone number on it so I could have returned it for a refill which probably would be the most ecologically friendly thing to do, but we’ve been watching a lot of Portlandia lately and my urge to make stuff out of trash is especially high.

And besides it was a good lightweight damp-proof material – I cut it up, sewed it to some felted sweater chests, and done.

Field tested and approved – not too heavy to pack along for a short to medium trip and allowed us to linger longer over our still steaming coffee for a legitimate break. The plastic is woven though, so it would not be ideal in a sopping wet situation, so I’m considering making some backed with oilcloth, though that would make them heavier and less bendy; or some fused plastic. In a pinch, they could also be used for staunching the flow of a serious wound or added warmth shoved into a jacket…

And the knitted hat is Stephen West’s Botanic Hat pattern.

* If anyone knows the original source for this, please let me know!

*UPDATE*

Ravelers are fantastic creatures and came up with my reference in a snap! I saw it on Hanna Breetz’s Ever green knits blog.

6 Comments

Filed under recycling, sewing

Tagged as damp proof, felted, hiking, jerseydevil, knitting, outdoor ventures, outdoors, recycle, sewing, winter, wool

January 11, 2013 · 4:17 PM

Long term UFOs – part III

The boyfriend shirt quilt. I don’t have a good reason for why I never finished this, or why it barely got started for that matter. When N bought the house, he had a window of time where the lease on his apartment ended before the closing on the new place, so he moved to my tiny weird but wonderful apartment. In his last days before moving in with me, he tossed out half of his wardrobe (mostly over-sized 90s clothes) in a frantic windmill action – as he tossed, however, I snatched up. He was irritated, my apartment was already crammed, so why did I want to make it worse? I reassured him that it would turn into a nice quilt that he would have as a housewarming gift. I was already in the middle of making a quilt for my nephew, so I didn’t start on it right away. Then I began to enjoy N’s cooking more and more so I didn’t get out the sewing machine/s as often since I had to use the dining table that was previously minimally used. Then the newly purchased house need work, a lot of work, so we spent the next year sanding, staining, tiling, painting, reconstructing, digging, and whatnot so I don’t think I sewed at stitch of anything. Then I moved out of said apartment into the house and everything got boxed up and banished to the basement. Eventually, I dragged everything out and up to my newly restored third floor studio. I opened the beer box that held the shirts, cut up and ironed them, then made one patch and sort of started another.

Then what happened? I know there was still work to do on the house and much to do with the yard, but I still had time in the evenings… but I think my knitting obsession was taking off, then I was producing other things for craft fairs. And then N took a job across the state but we kept the house with me in it. I thought about making the quilt again for him to use in his new depressing apartment, but we were always traveling to see each other on weekends, so there never seemed to be any time. Now I am here with him, so it’s time I made this quilt! I started on a few scraps and will continue with my usual hodge-podge style.

I’m not sure if I have enough for a queen size, but if I need to augment, I’d like to thrift a few shirts that at least look like ones he had before or have now. I really should give myself a deadline.

1 Comment

Filed under quilts, recycling, sewing

Tagged as quilts, recycle, sewing

January 7, 2013 · 2:49 PM

Long term UFOs – part II

The sweater quilt. I joined Ebay in 1996 – those were the good old days before the vintage market got utterly saturated and you could sell stuff for a decent profit and find great stuff to buy. There were a few awesome thrift stores around where I lived, and I scoured one in particular weekly or more. At that time I was working in a gallery, putting off grad school, and convincing myself that I could be an artist even though I made little art and showed none of it. To supplement my meager income, I produced a few craft items for shops and fairs and sold vintage stuff online – mostly dishware, printed tablecloths, and some clothing. For a couple of years life was good, and my Ebay earnings paid for a few trips to visit friends and family scattered from coast to coast, but then I noticed a problem – namely I had a thrift-store problem, and for every item I bought to re-sell, I bought another or two or three to keep… This also coincided with the bottom falling out on things like Jadeite dishware and the like, so it was time to quit. But.I.Just.Couldn’t.Stop. I loved the sensory experience of whirring through a rack of old sweaters and my fingers landing on cashmere or something sturdy and sheepy, never mind the other senses tweaked from mothballs or a neighboring browser or her shrieking kid. I couldn’t quit the hunt for prime fiber, so I continued to go, but less frequently and I tried to stick to just the clothing racks and electronics (did I mention I also collected sewing machines? Yeah, back then I rarely moved…). I started to believe it was my destiny and responsibility to “rescue” sweaters of beautiful fibers that couldn’t be worn any longer, and I still do to some extent. But back to the 1990s, I had amassed a stack of sweaters in a pleasing color palette that I determined should be a quilt. I also determined that it should be a king-sized one, which I don’t know why – did I expect to get a bigger bed? Did I have a buyer in mind? Was that just the amount of fabric I had? I don’t remember. I also don’t know why I didn’t consider fulling [felting] them first, though I had to use the laundromat then and only did so when the need was dire, so my disdain of the place, and not wanting to do it by hand was probably it. So I started sewing (on one of my many vintage thrifted machines) and in a day or so, finished the top.

And then all movement on it ceased. I remember showing it to a few people who really liked it, and one in particular probably would have bought it for a decent price, but I just couldn’t figure out how to finish it. I had a stash of old army blankets that I thought I would use for the backing and I experimented with one but the stretchiness of the sweaters wasn’t playing well with the stiffness of the blanket. The blankets were also fairly heavy and I wanted this to continue to have a sweater-like drape. I also remember seeing a bolt of thin knitted material (wool & angora) in a antiques/junk store that would have been perfect, but it wasn’t there when I went back for it. Then I think I thought I would back it with a cotton/wool plaid material that just never went on sale, or a cotton flannel plaid that never existed in the colorway I’d desired. And then I hadn’t addressed a few of the holes that were in the sweaters from the beginning – I believe I was thinking about embroidery, but now I’d just like to repair them. So here it is about 15 years later, or maybe I’ll say nearly 20 since that sounds more dramatic. I actually still like it too, but its lack of a backside or trim is still troublesome.

If I had fulled the sweaters beforehand (and some are a bit already) I wouldn’t worry about it and would leave the rough side naked, but as it is now, I can see little bits of sweater coming off everywhere and making me bats, and the seams probably aren’t the strongest. The thought of attempting to back something so stretchy makes me ill, and I don’t really like a tufted look, but that would be easiest. I’m considering maybe using a jersey sheet, but haven’t looked for a giant cheap one yet. So this is the UFO that might fail my attempt to make it not so, but I will think about it, and maybe live with it on the bed for a bit…

Long term UFOs – part I

I was inspired by Completely Cauchy’s post about her long-term relationship with George, a beautiful (now finished) quilt. Hers was a relationship of nearly three years that reminded me that I have some so old that they’re common law now, or maybe they could even claim abandonment and neglect. But in my head, I see them finished and functioning in my life and I forget why they stalled. I know that I’m only to blame for my very whimsical approach to making things (whim in a bad unfocused sort of way, not one of quirkiness and smiles) and that is why I take months rather than days to finish some things, but other things came up too, right? I needed more materials, or thought I did, or if it was intended for a gift, the event passed by and then way by, or I thought it was something I could sell until I realized it took too long and I was my own sweatshop bastard boss, or, or, or…? So I am going to attempt to find out why a few select projects have languished (one for more than a decade!) and resolve* to finish them or send them to the scrap pile.

The t-shirt rag rug. I started this shortly after I moved into the house I moaned about in the first post, so that would make it around 6 years old, not too bad. I bought a giant crochet hook to make it and I told myself this was the excuse I needed to finally commit to learning how to crochet. I vaguely remember watching a few videos and starting it, but then I stopped…I think it was because I had cut up the shirts without any regard to keeping a uniform strip size, or else I just encountered my weird mental crochet block. So I started braiding the scraps. This was not an unfamiliar act for me – when I was around 10 or 12, I made a braided rag rug out of my mom’s old fabric and clothes scraps (including a 1960s era cotton paisley, and some suit wool) to rest on a brick dais of sorts where the wood stove was in our old house. I sat on that thing next to the stove nearly every day in the wintertime, then it became a favorite place of the dog’s as well. Needless to say, it was well-worn and probably thrown away when they sold the place. I had the intention of using my newly created t-shirt rug in my studio, but I ended up liking the bare floor since it was an easier surface on which to cut and smooth out materials. The shirts were all mine and mostly from the 1990s and early 00s and had become cropped from the dryer or had some other fault I couldn’t tolerate. And I have a vague memory of becoming annoyed with the balls getting twisted up while I was braiding them…but I quit the project about three years ago, though I think I may have gotten it out once in the meantime. Yesterday, I emptied out the box of rug snake:

It is much bigger pile than it appears, so I had the giddy sensation that maybe it was closer to being finished than I had remembered, so I tested it out.

Nope, it is still too small – larger than a doormat or bathroom rug, but too small for under the desk or kitchen table, or as I had originally wanted, a decent middle of the room-sized beast. But I’m also conflicted about not really loving the look of rag rugs – I abhor country decor for the most part, so now I think I’m remembering why I really stopped….

But I will finish it since I still have some balls of t-shirt and it requires no mental capacity.

*This is not a New Year’s resolution – the timing is pure coincidence.

Category Archives: recycling

Even quicker and more practical…

UFOs progess report

Thank you Mr. Moth (just this once)

A quick and pratical project

Long term UFOs – part III

Long term UFOs – part II

Long term UFOs – part I

Recent Posts

Archives

Categories

Meta