The Yarn Reclamation Project

and another brilliant thing about yarn!

I think we can all agree that yarn crafting in all its form is brilliant! It’s great for our mental health and soothes our anxieties, it taps into our creative souls and it’s a wonderful way to spend our time. It can also be a very easy way to spend our money as our bank accounts can attest on a fairly regularly basis.

Potentially it can be a very expensive hobby and although yarn comes in a wide range of prices and fibres, buying anything is a drain on hard earned cash. And at a time when disposable income is being squeezed left, right and centre this could prove to be quite worrying to our yarn loving hearts.

But rejoice! For our craft is highly versatile, yarn can be repurposed over and over again and there are various ways to get good quality yarn without handing over any more money. We can raid our pile of long forgotten works in progress. We can even look in our wardrobes and pick out knitted items that we don’t really wear anymore. Perhaps they were unwanted gifts or have seen better days (I have a couple of those!) Or if you’re like me, I have a few pattern samples that have just been living in a box.

All we need to do is reclaim the yarn by unravelling it, turning it into hanks, washing it, drying it, and balling it/caking it back up so that we can create something entirely new. Unfortunately, as with so many things, the “all we need to do” does require a bit of effort. The entire process is quite labour intensive and time consuming, but it’s incredibly satisfying and I do have a separate post prepared on the exact process which I will be posting in a few days.

But the fact that you’re taking an item that may not be getting as much love as it should (or maybe it’s had a little too much love over the years), repurposing it and creating something brand new without detriment to landfills or our bank accounts, is something really exciting that we should all take pride in doing.

A few of my underused pattern samples ready for reclaiming

So why did I decide to repurpose my box dwelling samples?

As a knitwear designer, I make my living by selling knitting patterns and the samples for my patterns are a lovely, but costly byproduct of the design process. To be honest, I could never afford to fund every design that is in my head (wouldn’t it be amazing if I could!?). But recently, a number of family and house issues have all struck at once and I’ve had to redirect my sales income, which usually funds my yarn, to other more pressing costs. This funding hole not only has to be filled, but also replenished by doing what I do best: designing and selling my patterns.

And when I thought about it, I had 10+ skeins of excellent quality yarn tied up in samples which are just too big for this short person to wear on a day to day basis. I could have sold the samples to fund more yarn, but it’s one off income that I may have had to wait for. Patterns, however, help build my portfolio and create long term income. Plus the original patterns for the “reclaimed” samples would still exist even after the samples are long gone!

And so my Yarn Reclamation Project came to be! As a blogger, I feel that sharing my reclaimed projects with you all is a way of showing that there are alternatives to buying new yarn so that we can all continue to reap the benefits of crafting, at a time when we’re all having to watch the pennies.

I’d love you to join me on this creative journey of mine from the initial process through to the final projects that arise from it. And I’ve already got one very special completed project that I will be sharing with you very soon!

Until next time…