Monday, September 19, 2016

Donated Yarn in Bad Condition - a Real Challenge

We "inherited" a small amount of light/mint green balls of yarn for our charity crafting group last week. There were 4 balls that were perhaps 3 oz each.

I planned to add them to our charity crafting donation stash. We each keep it separate from our personal stash of yarn.

Something made me check it out. Turns out is must be wool because every so many yards, it's like a critter ("moth" obviously) nibbled the yarn. I decided to use it right away.

This was a real challenge. I knew I'd need to cut and re-join many times with each ball. At first I tried the Russian Join (link here) but even that was too much trouble because the stretches of good yarn were not very long. I ended up simply knotting the two ends together and crocheting over them.

I had decided to work it into our favorite fingerless glovespattern. I was able to make 4 pairs - small, medium, large, extra large. It is a little lumpy in some places. It would not work for a gift or for my Etsy shop, but it will work very well for cold hands in our desert cold this winter.

The gloves are sturdy, and the wool makes them very warm for that particular type of recipient.

I'll toss them into a bag with a cedar ball until we give out the first batch of things to the homeless, probably sometime next month.

I'm so glad I followed my instincts on this.



2 comments:

Unknown said...

Do oh have an agency you give them to?

Evelyn Mayfield said...

For the homeless, we have a local priest with a homeless "following" both here and in Ely (very very cold there). We drop the stuff to one of his volunteers and she and her team distribute them at a weekly evening Mass service - the volunteers make 150 sandwiches and pass those out plus our donations, to those who gather around the little team. We've been working directly with them for over 2 years now. Before that, we sometimes took them to Catholic Charities or to the Salvation Army, etc. - then we stopped because we found some of our items in a local thrift shop. When we make them, we want them to go directly to a cold head, hands or neck...