Today you get two Two TWO updates for the price of one!
I'm sure you're excited.
First off, I'm going to tell you about something that happened at school a couple of months ago. (I was too lazy to post about it right away.)
I am a substitute teacher.
A lot of people, when they think of substitute teaching, especially subbing high school as I do, imagine some poor harassed soul dodging spitballs, attempting vainly to enforce some semblance of order, fighting to be heard over all the jeering, and wondering how her life went so wrong as to bring her here. There are definitely days like that, but fortunately these are few and far between (for me, anyway). I like being a substitute teacher and wouldn't mind continuing to be one for a few years yet if it paid better or offered benefits.
But anyway.
People don't tend to know that there is a lot of down time in subbing. Teachers have no way to know for sure who they're getting--or even if this person is familiar with the subject of the class--let alone whether this person is sane or competent. (Some subs are craaaaaazy! And is it any wonder with some of the crap we put up with?) Smart teachers learn fairly quickly not to assign anything to complicated. This means I spend a lot of time cooling my heels while kids watch a video, read, do worksheets, do bookwork, or just have a "study period." I wrote the rough draft to this blog entry while watching an English class write a timed in-class essay.
This is all a long-winded way of saying I get a lot of crocheting done at school. I read too, but the crochet is less attention-stealing.
And that is all to lead up to my story. We English majors can get wordy once we get going. We can't help it.
The story is this:
A while back I was scheduled to sub for the same class for two non-consecutive days in the same week. On the first day, I don't know, let's say it was Tuesday, I spent a lot of time working on my latest abomination (to be featured here when I finish it) and a little time explaining myself and my horrible creation to stunned students. ("I was in a hurry when I picked the yarn.")
That afternoon at the end of the day I found this under the front driver's-side wheel of my car:
How did it get there? Who was responsible? I don't know. The popular theory (popular with me anyway) is that some student who regards me as his or her favorite sub saw me crocheting in class and then saw the yarn matching my terrible project in the front seat of my car (I should leave yarn in my car more often), put two and two together, and took it upon him or herself to provide me with yarn that is more tasteful (defined as yarn that does not cause you to try to stab yourself in the eyes when you see it).
Why put this yarn under my tire?
I don't know. Kids are weird. Or maybe he or she put it on the windshield and it rolled off.
The other theory, let's call it "The Lame Theory," is that some other yarn enthusiast was carting yarn around the parking lot when a ball of it fell out of her arms or bag or whatever and happened to roll under my car. Let us put this silliness aside, shall we? I mean, that's a tall order to expect somebody to swallow. We all know people give thoughtful gifts to their substitute teachers all the time, right? Right???
Well, just because it's never happened before doesn't mean it can't happen now.
Just in case, I did bring the mystery yarn back with me to school that Friday, where it sat on my desk waiting to be recognized by a student who would either claim it or take credit for it. A couple of kids agreed that it was weird that I would find it under my car, but nobody fessed up to being responsible for its appearance.
So I tried. What else could I do? The yarn's mine now, and I still don't know how it got there.
Sims are slow little buggers.
If the yarn looks familiar it's because you have seen it before. This is the yarn I scavenged from all those sweaters. I still have tons left over.
The scarf itself is in the neighborhood of 11 feet long. I didn't use a pattern or anything. I just chained until it looked like I had a decent length (boy did I) and went from there.
I wanted a long scarf, but this is crazy long. If I hang it from my neck (without wrapping it around at all) it nearly reaches the floor. It's pretty wide, too, (8 inches) making it a lot of scarf to handle.
I haven't worn it out yet, but the rainy season is finally starting (here in December) so we'll see what happens.
Thursday, December 06, 2007
A Visit from the Yarn Fairy
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Thrift Store Sweaters: Revisited
FINALLY, I'm ready to tell you how my sweater unravelling went! It took forever because of camera-related technical difficulties, but I've finally done it.
I'll start out by introducing you to one of my favorite tools ever, and one that came in very handy for this project:
My trusty seam ripper. I love this thing. I've had this very seam ripper since I was a little kid and my grandmother was teaching me how to sew. As its name might imply, this thing is perfect for taking seams apart. Just jam the pointy end in there and use the sharpish part in the crook to cut the threads. (Easier to do than to explain). Then rip the seam open as far as you can (fun!) and repeat. Every crafting person should have one of these. They're great.
They're good for shoulder pads too.
Lots of times a shoulder pad will only be held on by a thread or two. It's way easier to remove shoulder pads with a seam ripper than with scissors because with scissors it's easier to accidentally snip into some of the yarn you're trying to save. Don't even get me started on how well they work on removing labels. Yay for seam rippers!
So while I ripped up many sweaters, the only one I'm going to give you the step-by-step for is this one:
The reason for this is that this sweater was the biggest pain in the ass, so there's the most to tell.
Before I get too far into complaining about this sweater, there is one reason I liked it. The yarn was big, which made it easier to photograph. This is pretty much the only pic of a good seam I got where you can kind of make out the seam:
You can see near the top where I've started pulling the seam apart. If you're lucky, the seam will be crocheted and you can just find the correct end of the magic string and pull and the seam comes apart. (This does NOT reduce the usefulness of the beloved seam ripper! You never know when you might get stuck! Besides, it helps when getting those seams started.)
Anyway, there's a reason this sweater was a bitch, and you can barely see it in this pic:
Fuzz. Lots of fuzz and lint all over this sweater. It had actually melded itself into the fibers of the sweater and made the deconstruction a much more difficult prospect than just pulling on a string.
My preferred method for unraveling is to unravel straight to a yarn ball winder, like so:
If you have a cooperative sweater you can just turn the crank and it will just pull the yarn along and do most of the job for you. This sweater wasn't so cooperative. The lint made the yarn stick and just turning the crank to do the unraveling would have threatened to break the winder at worst, and wind the ball far too tight at best. Besides that, I don't want to wrap up all that lint.
That meant that I had to pull out long sections of yarn by hand (which in some cases took a surprising amount of muscle) and then go over every inch and pull off any large hunks of lint.
After a while I had big balls of fuzzy lint floating around my table and that became irritating, so I broke out the scotch tape:
The tape was good for wrangling the lint and keeping it out of my hair. That doesn't look so bad, I know, but this is what I ended up with after doing one sleeve:
And this is some very densely packed lint!
One sleeve later, and this is what I get:
And work goes on and on. Five sweaters later, and here are the results (with some comments thrown in):
One ball of yarn for each sleeve, and two each for the front and back.
The white sweater was also a pain in the butt, but not because of lint. This yarn wasn't twisted very tightly when it was spun. You can kind of see this in the one piece of yarn trailing off the bottom ball there. This meant that if at any time I pulled the yarn too overzealously there was a very good chance that I would tear it apart. Very annoying.
The green gave me no trouble, mostly, except that the seams around the shoulders were bad seams and that cost me a lot of yarn.
The pink yarn came from what was once a GAP sweater, which according to one of my sweater unraveling tutorials, is a good kind of sweater to rip up.
Nothing much to say about the red yarn. I just like this tower I built here.
And so concludes, at long last, the great sweater odyssey. I already have a project in mind to use some of this yarn up (from my crochet calendar, no less!), but I'll have to finish a couple of other things first. I can hardly wait!
Saturday, February 03, 2007
A trip to the thrift store...
There exist, on the Internet, a couple of very good tutorials on unraveling sweaters for the yarn. It's a good way to get some way cheap and sometimes interesting yarn that you wouldn't necessarily come across in the store. I recommend either of the linked tutorials if you want to try this yourself, but I'm especially fond of the first one because it has more pictures. The only thing out of either tutorial I don't like is this one sentence from the second:
I would not recommend this as something fun to do (especially if you have more money than time) but if your yarn budget is meager this is an affordable way to get your hands on a sweater's amount of quality wool.Screw you! You can't tell me how to have fun! I actually find unraveling sweaters to be a total blast. I think it appeals to my destructive urges that everybody has. (Everybody has those, right?)
You know I'm an expert in this because I've frogged a whole TWO shirts in my day. One was an old, ratty, kind of greenish knit tank top that I had hiding in my closet. It had good seams and seemed like a good choice to sort of try out my skills on. The other was this peach-colored old lady cardigan (it had embroidered flowers and everything on it) that I bought at a garage sale. Here's a couple of samples of the yarn I got:
I know the green yarn looks gray. It looks gray in real life, too. I don't know why, since the top it came from was definitely green. As you might expect, the old ratty-looking top yielded old ratty-looking yarn. It was my first time, though, so I felt good about it. I made an old ratty-looking washcloth from some of the yarn. It would be pictured here, but I can't find it. That's just as well.
The rather thick-looking yarn from the old lady cardigan turned out to be three strands of thin yarn. That's ok, though, I just rolled it into the ball that way and when I crochet it I crochet the three strands together. I have used this yarn to make myself a pair of fingerless gloves, which were ugly (peach is not my favorite color), but which I liked anyway. I'd show you a picture of them, but I can't. The dog ate one and then the next day went back for the other one. I was really unhappy about that. Maybe one day I'll remake them, but so far I've had other projects to look at.
Anyway, on to the point. Today I went to a local thrift store and picked myself up five new sweaters that could have warmed my community's poor to unravel. Well, not new, but new to me. They all have the advantage of having good seams and while the yarn may not have been huge in all of them, it wasn't tiny either.
When I got home I washed them all (yes, together) in the hopes of eliminating that (just wonderful) thrift store smell. I was banking on the red shirt (actually more rust colored than red, but the camera makes it look red) being old enough and having been washed enough that it wouldn't turn the off white sweater pink. (This was a real concern, since the red sweater has enough suspicious stains on it that it's possible it's never been washed.) The off white sweater isn't pink now, but it does have lots of red lint on it. Yay!
Tomorrow I'll pick a sweater and begin the frogging process. I will, of course, take some pics and include a blog entry on my progress. Fun!!! Read more!
