Recycling a Sweater

Several months ago, I purchased a man's XXL sweater from a local thrift shop that I intended to unravel and recycle the yarn into a new project. Little did I realize how much work goes into unravelling a man's XXL sweater. There's definitely more than enough to knit myself a sweater and then some.

After taking apart the knit seams, I managed to unravel the front panel of the sweater and to get it wound up into a cake. I started unravelling one of the sleeves, but, did I mention the amount of work to unravel a sweater?

It's not that unravelling a sweater is difficult, although sometimes finding the beginning in order to unravel is frustrating, but unravelling just takes so much time! Plus, this sweater was knitted double-straned using a sport/DK weight yarn. So, I have to make sure that I unravel it evenly. Unravelling & winding onto a niddy noddy at the same time to help get rid of those kinks is TIME CONSUMING!

Here's the yarn on the niddy-noddy double-stranded

So, I put the the unfinished bits aside. However, it was taking up room, and I really wanted to try making myself a top-down raglan sweater, but I didn't want to buy some really nice yarn just to flub it horribly. So, I started knitting using the recyled yarn I had already wound up.

Wow, this yarn is just absolutely lovely to work with. It's a soft wool/mohair/nylon blend. It's a dark chocolate tweedy/heathery brown. I've almost worked my way through the first cake. Now I'm working to unravel the other unfinished bits so that I can continue knitting.