From Sweater to Shawl

My great grandmother Edna Zeigler Bame was a woman who recyled and repurposed long before we named what was for her generation a common practice.  She cut up used woolens to hook and braid rugs and arranged buttons on velvet to make pictures.  Disposable waste is a relatively new commodity, a product of twentieth century “progress.” 

A younger, socially responsible generation is leading the charge to save our planet by  advocating responsible stewardship of our natural resources and reduction of the “stuff” we accumulate.  I seek to live with this in mind.

Certainly one of the benefits of retirement is time to trod more deliberately and carefully.  A couple of weeks ago during a drop-in visit to our local thrift store, I found two sweaters for a dollar a piece, two sweaters worth of wool that could, with some imagination, be repurposed for another life and possibly be saved from a landfill. 

Thanks to the Internet and easy access to tutorials like this, I learned how to harvest yarn from a sweater.  I washed the sweater (some places suggest washing the yarn after you unravel the sweater, but I opted for the easier method of prewashing the sweater) and separated its parts by opening it up, seam-by-seam.

 

And then I simply unraveled it, winding it into balls as I went.

 Look at all this yarn!  For one dollar!

Using my recycled yarn coupled with two skeins of hand-painted sock yarn I had in my stash,  I made a prayer shawl for our church’s upcoming medical mission trip to Nicaragua;   this simple triangular prayer shawl of 100% natural fiber is thrifty, green , and socially responsible all at the same time.