Working

Taking Laura's advice, I decided to cannibalize some sweaters and other wool items for their yarn. The yarn from my thrift store afghan (a pretty wool number with jewel tones) is all gathered up and made into nice little balls. As much as I would have liked to have kept it for a blanket, it was really an inefficient design – there were huge holes knitted into the pattern, so it held in virtually no heat. Fortunately, it came apart easily, so now I have oodles of single ply, worsted weight wool yarn. Aside from the pink on the mittens, all the loose yarn pictured was reclaimed from the afghan.

I'm really excited about these little mittens I made for the bazaar from felted sweater bits. The blue ones are made from two sweaters – one I felted and the other “unknit."

I'm working on some more mittens in a couple different colors, including brown and bright green, although the trimmings are not yet decided. I've experimented with some different pallets: brown with tan or purple and green with cerulean. I have a couple nice red wooly sweaters, but I don't know if I have a good color to trim them with. I'm thinking white, for a peppermint sort of effect.

The wallets are a bit tougher to finish up... The grasshopper design turned out well (a combination of applique and machine embroidery), but they were really labor intensive.


Each of the wallets has a different combination of outer and liner fabrics. I'm finding it more enjoyable to pick and choose the combinations than finish the things. Ah, well.