15 Things To Do With Old Sweaters - felted sweater projects

“What can you do with a shrunken sweater? What can you do with a shrunken sweater? What can you do with a shrunken sweater, early in the morning? Cut it into pieces and make some projects, cut it into pieces and make some projects…”

Felt, according to the Wikipedia, is the oldest fabric known to man. And the art of felting and its relation boiled wool surely go back to the first time someone accidentally put a sweater into a kettle of water. So it is nice to know that when I inadvertently shrank some sweaters last fall I was drawing on a millennium of tradition and craft. Some of the sweaters were better for it, shrinking just enough to give me a corset-like trimness, and their tighter weave made them warmer. Others were much too small and have been lying around just waiting to get cut up into projects.

One of the great things about felted sweaters is that they don’t unravel when you cut them, so you have a lot of options to make things without spending all of your time preparing all the edges of the pieces. I’ve been looking for a scarf for our daughter. It’s a tricky thing to buy a scarf for a toddler because you don’t want something that can get caught and choke them, nor do you want something that they can fling off. I had in mind a small scarf with a button hole (or velcro) closure that fit over her coat to keep out a draft. I couldn’t find one anywhere, and when I did track one down it was thirty-five dollars which seemed a bit high.

Here is my solution: a shark sleeve collar. It is easy to make, all told it probably took me about an hour.

Step one: Shrink a sweater. Put a sweater into the washing machine using hot water and a little bit of soap. Dry it in the dryer. You should have a sweater that is about 20-30% smaller than before. (repeat?) Here are some tips.

Step two: cut off the sleeve at the seam. The dip at the bottom gives it a little shark like profile.

Step three: sew the edges of the seam shut at the ends. I used yarn, but you can also use thread, lanyard, embroidery floss, or even dental floss. A whipstich works really well. Here is a link to a tutorial on how to hide the knots:

Step four: find a nice black button like a shark’s eye.

Step five: figure out where you want to put the buttonhole and sew a small
rectangle with stitches, leaving a space in the middle that you can slit with
a small knife or scissors (or a seam-ripper is ideal if you have sewing supplies, but you don’t need one).

Other things you can do with felted sweaters are: felt monster dolls, coffee sleeves, water bottle covers, hot water bottle covers, tote bags, sachets for popurri, christmas stockings, baby pants and skirts, and sweaters, bicycle handlebar pads, ipod cases, messenger bags, quilts and blankets, and coasters.

Once you start looking for inspiration you’ll find that you’ve stumbled into a vast world of online links and photos. A great place to start is on Flickr, where there is a Flickr Recycled Sweaters Pool and a Made from RecycledSweaters Pool. Etsy has a lot of merchants making nice things as well.

You will be recycling, making nice, soft and warm things while being thrifty and crafty.

Things we like:
If you are inspired but would rather just buy something beautiful that someone has made out of recycled sweaters then take a look at Crispina.com. She has been making beautiful blankets (we have one and love it) and whimsical animals for over twenty years up in the Berkshires.

6 Ways To Greet the New Year - hoppin john and other traditions

A New Take on First-Footing

A few years ago, some new friends and I were having a low key New Years Eve in the Berkshires, when I remembered a family New Years tradition from my childhood - on the stroke of midnight, we had carried across the threshold things we wanted in our home and life in the new year.

A little googling reveals that my family’s custom is drawn from a bit of British folklore called “first-footing.”  The first person to cross the threshold of a house in the new year - ideally a dark-haired man bearing gifts - is said to bring good luck to the home and its inhabitants. Traditional gifts included a coin for wealth, bread for nourishment, salt for flavor, coal for warmth, greenery for health, and whisky for fun. A household’s members could wait and hope for the right visitor to arrive bringing the appropriate items, or take matters into their own hands and troop across the threshold themselves at the stroke of midnight.

Get this ancient tradition working for you this year.  First, to get all the luck on your side, enlist a dark-haired man.  If don’t have a real live one handy, a biography of Abraham Lincoln or a Cary Grant DVD could be a plausible stand-in. Then spend some time thinking about what you’d like more of in your life in 2009.  Gather the traditional symbols, or replace them with alternatives: a kitchen scale for balance, a rock for perspective, an olive for peace. This year, we’re carrying an envelope for opportunity, legos for ingenuity, an apple for health, whisky, and Willa (we definitely want more of her in 2009).  And we’ll be tucking dollar bills into our back pocket while we’re at it., just in case.

Here are few other fun and thrifty ways to bring good luck in the new year:

Eat Hoppin’ John
Black-eyed peas and rice are an old new year’s culinary tradition: “eat poor that day, eat rich the rest of the year,” the saying goes.
http://bitly.com/z1QZ

Write a New Year’s Haiku
Do this on your own, or join in with this group Haiku writing celebration:
http://bitly.com/4bgD9