How To Care For Your Lovely Cashmere And Other Yarns

One of the best ways to get some great cheap cashmere yarn, is to recycled it from an old, out of date sweater or a sweater you find at the op-shop or thrift store.  Unraveling an old sweater is not hard to do...you may need just a little patience the first few times you try it...but once you have your pile of recycled yarn, you will see it was definitely worth the effort.  The only tools I suggest you use are a seam ripper...which can be purchased easily at any craft store or haberdashery.




The following is an outline of how to unravel that sweater

1. Gently remove any labels and tags with some very sharp scissors.  You can also use a seam ripper to do this (which is much easier).
2. Using a seam ripper, start at the bottom edge of a seam and begin ripping it back slowly stitch by stitch.  If you are lucky, you will find that perfect spot that you can actually just begin to pull the seam back without using the seam ripper. You know you have found this spot because you can easily pull the seam out without any issues.
3. Repeat step 2 for all of the seams.
4. Now your sweater should be in all its pieces now.  Pick up one piece and cut the "bind off" edge.  You can alternatively look for the woven in ends and then start pulling apart the "bind off" edge. (I personally find it quicker and easier to just cut this edge...but you do lose a tiny bit of yarn if you do it this way)
5. You should now be able to grab a strand of yarn and begin pulling.  The yarn should begin unraveling easily.  I suggest using a ball winder if you have one to wind the yarn up as you unravel it.  Otherwise, just wind the yarn into balls.
6. Now your recycled yarn is ready to use for a new knitting, crochet or weaving project.

A few little tips:

• On your first go of unraveling a sweater, you will find it easier if you try a sweater made with a thicker ply yarn.  Thinner yarns may break easily or cause you some headaches if you are not used to them.
• Make sure your sweater has not been seamed together with a machine (called serging) because it may have resulted in cutting each row...this means that you will wind up with a pile of little strips of yarn instead of a long continuous strand.  It is ok is the shoulder seams are done this way as you will only lose a little yardage.
• Unraveling some fibres or yarns, such as 100% angoras or really furry yarns, can be really tedious and most likely will end up in knots or breakage...so you may not want to waste your time trying to recycle these yarns. You may wind up so frustrated that you throw the yarn out in the end.
• I would not bother with unraveling anything with lots of colour changes because you will not get much of one single colour out of the hard work you will have to put in recycling the yarn from a sweater like this.