Repurposed

I've had this sweater hanging in my closet for a year. Not that long of a time to the ladies, but way too long for the men. I wore it a couple times after purchasing, but then decided it didn't have enough shape and it just kind of hung off my body. And it shed little gray fibers on EVERYTHING. After wearing it, my desk chair at work would be covered in lint balls.

So I decided to pull it apart and reuse the yarn to make something else.

Easier said than done. Yeesh.

The sweater had a wide ribbing at the boat-neck and a smaller ribbing on the sleeves. I started with these first. It was terribly difficult. I couldn't figure out what they had done to stitch the two pieces together. I knew it had to be something simple, but it eluded me until I made it about 1/4 of the way through the back panel (after the neck, both sleeves, and half of the front).  This meant lots of snipping with the scissors, some time with the seam rippers, and lots of swearing when I'd pull out a three foot piece of yarn that I thought was going to be 50 feet long.

But alas, I finally ripped out the whole thing. Once I got past the middle of the front I had it down pat and my hands were flying at pulling it all out.

Got quite a bit of yarn out of it. I'm considering making some headbands with it. I might have a hard time knitting something for myself with it because I know the amount of shedding that goes on. But it's 60% alpaca, 40% acrylic, so it's really decent yarn. Totally worth reusing.

I know I could have donated the sweater to Goodwill and made someone very happy at their newish Ann Taylor Loft purchase, but it seemed like a disservice to donate something that I knew didn't fit well and shed all over the place. Instead, I'm going to knit it up into some other fantastic thing, and then get people to pay me for it.

Makes me feel kind of like Scrooge McDuck.