Yarn-to-be

After the last couple of heavy-duty posts, I thought I'd lighten things up a bit around here. Look at the yummy yarn I bought today at Goodwill!


What? You don't see yarn? I do! These sweaters have been officially dubbed yarn-to-be. I have read and re-read several tutorials on reclaiming yarn, and I want to give it a go. I spent about twenty minutes this morning combing the racks at Goodwill and actually found four or five sweaters that would have worked. My budget's limited, however, even at $4 per sweater, so I narrowed it down to these two. The green is a beautiful 100% Italian Merino Wool, and the salmon is an intriguing blend. Here, I'll let the label speak for itself.

I'm not a huge fan of the salmon color, but I figure this is a great opportunity to practice my yet-to-be-developed dyeing skills. Since it's 65% animal fiber, it should hold some Kool Aid dye. If nothing else, an over-dye may have an interesting mottled effect. I plan to do a little color calculating first, though...I don't want to end up with mud.

If I learn the yarn-reclaiming process well and think it's something I can do well, I may consider selling it in my new etsy shop. I'm not set up yet...I need to get some purses and bags made before I jump in. (What's a shop without inventory, after all?) I do, however, have a name for it now: R3 bags. (The 3 should be superscript - anyone know how I can do that on blogger?) The three R's are [tentatively] Reuse, Reclaim, Repurpose. While I predict that most of what's up there will be bags, I'm not closing my mind to the idea of offering reclaimed yarns, and maybe even plarn. I've found that a lot of people do one plarn bag, then never touch the stuff again, simply because of the labor involved in cutting the plarn. Obviously, this is still all in the very beginning stages, but in a week or two I'll be able to devote more time to it. I also need to get Photoshop Elements installed on my new computer, because not having a logo finalized is driving me nuts.

Anyway, I did manage to find a little already-in-the-yarn-stage yarn today, too. It was $2.22 a skein. I'm not familiar with Plymouth Encore, so I hope that was a good price. Maybe I don't want to know...