did you buy that new?

Scrappy Hats

You know how, when you knit, there's always yarn left over? Always? And how you just can't help yourself but you must keep it? 

There are drawers full of yarn at my mother's house. Oh, there are whole skeins with their tags still on, and a bag of baby weight mustard yellow cashmere tidily unraveled from a failed sweater, but mostly there are scraps. A yard here, a ball there, pretty soon you're talking YARN. 

I'm a terrible knitter, but I kind of like the idea of it, and it's something portable to do on the train when I'd rather listen to music than read. I keep thinking I'm going to make a sweater one day, but instead, I make baby hats. Sometimes I make them with a specific baby in mind, and sometimes I mail them off to the local hospital's NICU. 

So what I've been doing is working my way through the scrap yarn in the big workroom at my mother's. I gather up enough bits in complementary colors, cast on 60 stitches, and just start mindlessly knitting. When it looks right, I start decreasing. Bang zoom, a little roll brim hat.  I change color with abandon, I usually tie the ends together (the horror!), and I sometimes mix wool and acrylic and cotton. Often, I'll use a bit or a lot of something whose provenance I know - like the pictured hat: the pale blue cotton was leftover yarn from a hat that I made for my mother. 

There's something completely satisfying about a little hat made from nothing. 

Posted by Magpie

Photo by Niobe

Little Felted Ponchos

The felting bug bit me hard last Christmas. Then, some months ago, I'd seen a poncho for sale on the website of an Atlanta based craft cooperative, and I said "I can do that". I felted a couple of shetland wool sweaters, cut them out freehand, blanket-stitched the edges, and added some appliques made from scrap felted wool (from last year's projects).

Here's one of the sweaters, showing how it was cut. I also cut the neckhole just along the transition to the collar ribbing, though if it had been a v-neck sweater, that would have been completely unnecessary. The V at the bottom starts just above the ribbing along the lower edge of the sweater, and the indent under the arms is at the point where the sleeve meets the body.

The blue sweater had been a cable-knit, but once it was felted, I decided I liked the inside better - it had a more interesting appearance. The points of the star are plain pearly shirt buttons, and both ponchos are blanket-stitched along the edge with black wool. My daughter got the one with the star, and her cousin got the one with the heart.

Funnily enough, that same Atlanta craft cooperative has just opened a shop in the next town over from us. I went in there before Christmas and found a rack of the ponchos, and felt oh so smug for having made my own.

Posted by Magpie

Repurposed > Hats & Blankets

So last weekend, while I was at my mother's house and casting about for things with which to occupy myself, I found myself raiding a drawer of tee-shirts to turn them into hats for babies in Haiti. I swear, there must be two hundred tee-shirts in her house - but that I had the time to cut and sew more.

Two tee-shirts, a red one and a yellow one, became four little baby hats - one yellow, one red, and two half and half. But then, the remaining pieces of the shirts cried out to me, "you can't throw us out!", so with a rolling cutter (a genius device if ever there were one), I cut out a mess of 5" squares, sewed them together, backed it with a piece of a flannel sheet, and tied it with red embroidery thread. Ta da!

You may notice that there's some blue & white striped fabric in that there quilt, but no matching hats. Well, that's because the first two hats I tried, using a blue & white polo shirt, were a complete disaster because I failed the cardinal rule of sewing: I sewed the right side to the wrong side. And since it's a jersey knit, it was just impossible to rip the seam so I gave up.

Today, the hats and quilt are going in the mail to Maine, and from there they'll be packed up to be sent to Haiti, to be included in Safe Birthing Kits. These kits - consisting of plastic sheeting, hand sanitizer, a sterile piece of string and razor blade, and these newborn baby caps - have the potential to reduce infant and maternal mortality, and give babies a safer, healthier start.

There is something inordinately gratifying about repurposing a tee-shirt to help make the world a slightly better place.

Posted by Magpie

Repurposing

So, Debbie emailed me and twisted my arm to get me to join this here marauding band of vintage avengers.  And really, how could I say no?  Because I've developed something of an obsession with turning cast-offs into something new.

Last year for Christmas, most of the females in my nearest/dearest circle got bags made of old sweaters.  Felted, cut, sewn, buttons added, straps affixed, bingo!  I had an enormous amount of fun finding the sweaters, figuring out the felting, and listening to the bags as they strove to emerge from the thrift shop sweaters turned into gnarled and matted shades of their former selves.  Yeah, the cellar was full of lint when I was done, but the tactile wonders of the felt are incomparable.  You want to try it?  You can find some instructions here.

I have plans for more felted goodness this year, and in fact, I am drooling over every last thing in this Threadbanger post. 

But I've also been dabbling in repurposing tee-shirts - turning them into baby hats and baby blankets. 

The other day, I was knee-deep in tee-shirt squares and engrossed with the sewing machine. My six-year-old niece was beside me, hovering and fussing about with spools and ribbon and yarn.  She got hot and took off her sweater, and said to me, pointedly, "that's my sweater, don't cut it up".

People, don't let me near your tee-shirts and sweaters.

Posted by Magpie