What Momma Wants

I am knitting another pair of mittens. Since my last pair turned out so fabulously, I wanted to see if I could out do myself. How could I possibly out do the loveliness of alpaca mittens lined with baby alpaca and silk? One word: cashmere.

I needed to line my new mittens with cashmere. And not just any cashmere blend yarn. Nope. 100 % cashmere. That would make these mittens special.

There was only one problem. I don’t have the yarn budget for 100 % cashmere, not even if I found it on sale. Now what was I to do?

It just so happened that my daughter wanted frames to decorate her room with. What better place to find cheap frames that at a thrift store? (Truth be told, we hit up IKEA first, but it was closed.) While Alea searched for the perfect frames, I wandered over to the men’s sweater rack with an idea brewing in my head. What if I found a cashmere sweater I could unravel? I had read about doing this on other knitting blogs. Could I pull it off and get some useable yarn?

I came home with this. Price tag for it was $5.99, but since I bought it on Tuesday, and Tuesdays are customer appreciate days, I got 25% off.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I ripped out the seams and ended up with a pile of pieces.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After a lot of false starts and small pieces of yarn, I succeeded in getting the yarn to unravel in a continuous strand. When the first sleeve was done, and wound onto the back of a chair, I had something that looked like this.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I proceeded to unwind the back and what I could get from the front, and when I was done I had several crinkled, seemingly unworkable skeins of yarn. I am not going to lie, it took a long time to get that sweater unraveled, about 6 hours total. I had yarn though. Now I just needed to make it usable. I put the skeins into a cold water bath with some Soak and then I hung them to dry with a little added weight to make them straighten out.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What did I end up with after two days of hard work and a complete mess of yarn scraps all over the floor? This.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Those are two really plump skeins of two ply, lace weight 100% cashmere yarn. I haven’t weighed it yet, but I bet I have almost 100 grams of yarn. Held double, it will be perfect to line my mittens with. 100 % cashmere, for under $5.00. Yeah, I am that cool.  At least in my own mind.

(Thanks to this blog post from Chaotic Crafter for the wonderful tutorial on how to reclaim yarn. )

P.S.  It was over 200 grams of yarn.  Who hoo!