From cast off cardigan to cherished creation

Do you know that there are very few yarn stores left? Those places where you can walk in and browse with your eyes and feel the softness or prickliness of the wools? I was highly critical of our local Joann's poor selection of yarn, until they went and closed that store and my nearest nearest Joann's is now 12 miles away. A knitting store just blocks from my house lost their lease when the property was sold and a Walgreen's was built in its place. There is a lot of yarn for sale online. I have bought from Knitpicks, Jimmy Bean's and Webs. They all have nice yarns and some of it is affordable, but the really good stuff; such as cashmere, and very fine merino, is super expensive.
Also, it is very easy to make mistakes color matching and the softness and pliability of the yarn can't be judged from an online photo. Online yarn stores don't offer samples (very foolish of them in my opinion), so you can't see before you buy. Also, I have to pay for shipping. So if I don't like the wool, I have to pay to return it.

What's a knitter to do? What I am doing now, which is an experiment, the success of which has not been entirely established, is creating my own yarn library, or "stash" as knitters like to call it, by recycling used sweaters. Luckily I live near a Goodwill, Salvation Army, and two other thrift stores. These carry cashmere sweaters, merino, and silk mixes. Salvation Army has 50% off days, and Goodwill sells almost every sweater for $4.99. Such a deal!

Selecting sweaters:

Every month I visit these stores and buy sweaters. So far this has been a summer hobby so I don't know if there will be as many sweaters to buy, or at such cheap prices, come winter. Lots of people clean out their closets of winter clothes in the summer and I have bought about 100 sweaters. I pass over the felted ones produced by someone's laundering mistake, and also the ones with moth holes, and buy only the most pristine of the sweaters.

Washing and Unwinding: 

This tutorial on unwinding sweaters got me started and I then tweaked the process a little as described below.

After machine washing the sweaters on a wool setting and hang drying them, I unravel the seams in this order: neckband, side seams - wrist to hemline, shoulder seams. This order is the reverse of how the sweater is assembled. I use the Royal ball winder to creating center-pull balls of yarn. I clamp the sweater fabric to something, load the loose end onto the Royal ball winder, wrap the end around the slot about ten times to anchor it firmly, and then unravel directly. When I encounter a break in the yarn, I hand felt it together rather than tie it. Hand felting is done by overlapping (in parallel) the two broken yarn ends by 1.5 to 2 inches, wetting the yarn ends a little, then rubbing between the palms of your hands. The moisture and heat produced from the rubbing cause the fibers of the two pieces to lock together. This is working very well. The wool that is unwound will have a lot of kink that will stay until the wool is soaked, which I do only after I have plied the wool into a thicker yarn (more on that later).

It is important to be able to find the center-pull end of the ball later. Unfortunately when you remove the ball from the ball winder this end till tend to retract into the center of the ball. To avoid this, remove the 10 winds that you made around the slot of the ball winders shaft, hold them in your hand, then remove the ball.

Creating a library for my stash of yarn:

To make identification and coordination of colors easy, I made color charts out of large index cards, one per each of these color families: blue, yellow, red/orange/coral, aqua/teal, green, tan/brown, gray, pink/burgandy, and purple. I staple a sample of each sweater's yarn to the appropriate index card, uniquely label the sample, then put the actual balls of yarn in a ziplock bag with the label on the bottom seam. This way I can match colors easily, then find the balls of yarn in my storage closet. Each color family has a shelf in the closet. Here is the "Blue" card and an example ziplocked, labeled bag of yarn:

The huge amount of kink in some of the yarns is shown in the samples. This kink can only be removed by soaking and hanging the yarn to dry with weights -- more on that later.

First attempt at knitting this yarn (Lesson in what not to do):
From reading about commercially produced sweaters, I know that yarns used in them, if they are multiple ply (more than one thread of yarn), the yarns are not twisted together. From this I deduced that I could combine four strand of the unraveled cashmere yarn together without twisting it. I designed a little headband for my daughter Tessa and started knitting with four separate strands. This was not so easy because the yarn tended to split. It was also hard to fix mistakes or tear out because I had to account for each of the four threads and not lose any of them. The kink in the yarns also made things just a little more difficult.

I finished the headband, soaked it in warm water and soap, rinsed, blocked it, and this is the result:

The slight unevenness in the stitches, especially apparent in the purl background, is because the yarn was not soaked and weighted before knitting to release the kink. And after knitting the piece from kinked wool it is not possible to weight the yarn to assist in straightening it. Some of the kink came out by soaking it after knitting, but not enough in my opinion.

The pattern for this headband is available at Margaret Holzmann's pattern shop on Ravelry.

Unexpected Outlay of $ on Equipment:

It is ironic that part of why I got into recycling yarn was to save money on yarn. In this phase, I spent about $400 on equipment. Not to mention the additional closet space required to store all this stuff...

Twisting: I wanted the yarn I was knitting to be like yarn I could buy commercially. That is: twisted, not prone to splitting, and straight -- not kinked. I had already determined that I did not want to soak single strands of cashmere to get the kink out because the yarn was so fine that it would become a tangled mess. So I decided that the right order was to twist the kinked yarn together into a multiple ply, worsted weight, then soak to remove kink, and dry the hanks. I learned that a spinning wheel could twist the yarn quickly.  Spinning wheels are expensive but I found a good deal on a used one on the Ravelry spinning equipment group. The seller lived 20 miles from my house and asked me to pick up the wheel. She teaches spinning and when I picked up the wheel she gave me a demonstration of spinning and plying. I found a plying tutorial to get me going. My spinning wheel is a Schacht Ladybug, which is a danish modern style, smallish beginner's wheel.

Yarn has to be plied in the opposite direction of the twist of the individual strands. My cashmere strands, which are 2-ply, are twisted counter-clockwise, so the individual strands must be plied (combined together into a yarn composed of several individual strands) in the clockwise direction. I didn't want to waste good yarn, so at first I practiced plying with some old acrylic yarn.

After practicing for an evening, I moved on to plying my first ball of cashmere. To ply, I placed four center pull balls on the floor around my feet. I felted together the four separate strands and tied that to the leader on the bobbin. At first the yarn I plied was under-twisted, which I discovered only after I had soaked and dried it. An easy fix was just to run the yarn  through the plying process on the spinning wheel again to give it more twist, re-soak and hang-dry.

Once I had plied together the four strands, I unwound the yarn on the bobbin onto a niddy noddy to produce a hank. Following a tutorial on setting the twist in plied yarn, I tied the hank in 4 places then soaked it in warm lightly soapy water, "fulled" it (wacked it again and again onto a towel spread out on my counter), and hung it up to dry with some weights at the bottom to help straighten out any remaining kinks. After the hank was dried, I put it on my Swift (I found this very modestly priced Swift at Overstock), and rolled it into a ball off the Swift. This was amazingly easy.

I plied four strands of cashmere together, created hanks, soaked, and hang dried with weights, and then knitted them into sample gauges with U.S Size 5 needles. After blocking, this is what they look like:

The blue hank is composed of four different cashmere strands from the blue and purple families. The red hank is composed of two strands of an orange/pink color, a red strand, and a forth strand that was made from felting together some waste strands in the pink/burgandy family. It is this strand that creates the striped look. This strand started out (top to bottom) as burgandy, the hot pink, then light pink, then red. I really like the way this technique turned out although the colors are a little strong.

Based on the standard gauge for yarns, the weight of this 4-strand cashmere is light worsted. My swatch is 24 inches stitches wide, and so has 20 stitches per 4 inches of width. See the chart snippet below from the Craft Yarn Council's standard yarn weight page.

My next step will be to experiment to see what weight I can get from plying 5- or 6-strands of 2-ply cashmere. Stay tuned...