Finding Recycled Yarn on the Internet

Picture courtesy of KnitWit site. Have you tried to recycle yarn? Have you bought a sweater at a resale shop and tried to take it apart to reuse the yarn in your project and pulled your hair out in the process?
If you have attempted this and decided it isn’t something you want to do, might I suggest looking at shops on the internet that recycle the yarn for you. One shop I found is [tag]Jag’s Funky Fibers[/tag].

[tag]Ebay[/tag] and [tag]esty[/tag] can be additional great sources for [tag]recycled yarn[/tag]. One shop on ebay, [tag]The Twice Sheared Sheep[/tag], believes that “yarn unfortunate enough to be born as a store bought sweater still deserves to be made into a hand made item”. They have some yummy pink silk/angora up right now. Another shop on ebay is [tag]Recycled Yarn and Gently Used Stuff[/tag]. Good name, right?

Because the yarn is recycled, you need to buy all that you think you might need, because that is probably all you will find.

I guess I must have had this pattern on my mind, because I had chosen this log cabin blanket recipe to write about, promptly forgot about it and a couple of weeks later started knitting a log cabin blanket using all my pink yarn.

It might stay pink if it makes it to baby blanket sized, or I might add in some pastel green and blue, too, to make a bigger blanket. We’ll see. I’m also holding several strands of yarn together to make a kind of bulky yarn, which means it’s deeply satisfying how much yarn is used even as the project is still relatively small.

In Kristen Finlay’s version, DK weight yarn scraps (or fingering/sock yarn held double) are used to make a simple scrappy log cabin blanket that’s lighter weight than my version. Log cabin is a great technique for knitters of any skill level because it’s worked in garter stitch. The only not completely basic technique you need for log cabin knitting is picking up stitches.

If you’ve never worked a log cabin knitting project before, this is a good introduction, and it is really nice to use all your yarn scraps in one big project you’ll use for years to come.

If you use a lot of DK weight yarn you can keep building on it whenever you finish a project, or if you use more worsted weight you can do the same thing with it, it will just be a little bigger starting out than the pattern calls for. How big it gets is totally up to you.

I have really been enjoying working on my log cabin project, and it’s my current sitting at my desk and need a break knit (do you have one of those or is it just me?).

Ready to start your own log cabin blanket knitting project? You can grab the free pattern from Kristen Finlay on Ravelry.

Need more log cabin inspiration? Check out more log cabin knitting patterns.

[Photo: Kristen Finlay]

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