Felted Sweaters

tongfengdemao commented on my post about recycled yarn with this:
Do you know if this will work on a sweater that shrank? I have a cardigan I loved and it shrank and I bet there'd be enough yarn to make a vest that fits.

Unfortunately, the answer to this question is No. When a wool sweater (or any knitted item) shrinks in the wash, the individual fibers get matted together and become impossible to pull apart without ripping.

This doesn't mean that a shrunken sweater is garbage. If you don't know anyone small enough to wear it, you could buy an inexpensive teddy bear or doll, dress them in the shrunken sweater and you have a gift.

Or you could cut big squares out of the front and back and stitch them together to make a pillow. Repeat with the sleeves for a smaller pillow.

Ellen of the long thread has done several recycled crafts, including some that involve shrunken sweaters (scroll down). two kitties has quite a few felted sweater projects.

Google "felted sweater" and you'll get tons more ideas.

Any other suggestions?

Recycled Yarn

I have several projects of my own in store for you as soon as I can get my act together. In the meantime, here's a link to one of the basics.

Maybe you've unraveled a store-bought sweater to re-use the yarn. Maybe you've heard that such a thing could be done, but had no idea how. Ashley of Nouveau Fiber Arts has an excellent tutorial on how to unravel a sweater to recycle the yarn. I followed it myself to turn an XXL Ralph Lauren men's sweater into yarn, which I then turned into a cream-colored cardigan for the office. I got the original sweater at The Salvation Army and I call the sweater I made my $4 sweater. I have several others waiting for the recycling treatment. 

Ashley is having a sale on wool roving and locks and recycled yarn right now, so even if you don't want to do any yarn recycling yourself, go visit her and do a little discount shopping.

Whether you need yarn for knitting, crochet, weaving or children's art projects, recycling yarn is a great and frugal way to increase your yarn stash. 

Thanks, Ashley, for a great tutorial!

Rocky Doormat

Sara, of Handy Crafts did a fabulous, expensive looking doormat out of a rubber doormat, river rocks, ad rubber cement, all for $12. She credits Curbly.com for the inspiration.

Go visit Sara and admire her handiwork.

As always, if you try this yourself, be sure to share a picture.

I wonder how this would work with the bag of mosaic tile I've had for the past decade but never did anything with.

Gift Stash?

Since I posted about this subject on my other blog, I thought I'd ask the question here.

The question?

Do you have a gift stash?

I'm asking mostly to figure out if I should start one of my own.

If you're not familiar with the concept, a gift stash works like this. Say, you're a knitter and you see a pattern for a hat you'd like to make. You find the yarn for it in your yarn stash and knit the hat. But you don't need a new hat and you're not sure who you'd give it to. So you put it in the gift stash and when you need to give someone a gift, you can check the gift stash before going shopping, or knitting something especially for the recipient.

With other crafts, especially frugal crafts, you might say to yourself, "hey, I could make a whatsit out of these thingies here that I was just going to throw out." If you don't have an immediate need for a whatsit, then you can put it in the gift stash. I suspect that if you don't have a gift stash, you'd just give up and throw out the thingies instead of using them to make something.

So a gift stash can be extra frugal because it would keep you from having to buy gifts when you've already made something suitable. It also means that you can make that whatsit, or hat, or arigurumi toy without any time pressure. That time pressure can turn into finishing a two year old's birthday present several months late. (Yes, there's an unfinished pillow sitting on my coffee table. Why do you ask?)

So, do you have a gift stash?

Patch Job

If it's a crafty way to be frugal, is it also a frugal craft? I'll save the contemplation of such weighty matters until I've had a little more coffee.

Hadley, of Hadley Gets Crafty had posted a tutorial for patching up jeans and cutoffs. Check out the last picture. Her shorts don't look patched, they looked embellished!

I suppose you could even take it further by continuing the stitching all over.

As always, be sure to share pictures if you try this yourself.

Craft Challenge Completed

The follow up to yesterday's post, which is actually from December 2007.

Once I had made enough gifts to fill out my gift-giving list, I lost steam. I'm more interested in the finished product than the process, so I didn't feel like turning my stash of craft supplies into a stash of future gifts that might never find the right recipient. So no drawers have been emptied in the course of this challenge, but many cool and well received presents have been made.

First up, the initial ornaments. I've made these in the past and they're always a big hit. Little kids like their initials.



To make them, just shape some Sculpey into the recipient's initial. When forming them, if you can't just wrap a hook around the letter itself (like with that letter M), then make holes. Bake it, let it cool and then start mixing up paints. I have a set of acrylics that I use. I mix up the colors in the plastic containers my disposable contact lenses come in.



In the past, all the ornaments have been for girls, so I've gone with pinks and soft blues and so on. We have a baby boy in the family now, plus 1 baby girl and an adult woman I'm giving ornaments to, so for the boy, I used the primary, unmixed colors, or mixed, but masculine-looking colors, and then combined with other colors to make more feminine shades.

You need to paint one side, let it dry and then paint the other. I was able to store some paint over night in old contact lens cases. But mostly, I had to mix fresh colors. Here's a look at the back so you can see the differences.



Then I took some wood and craft paper ornament shapes I had left order from a few years ago. Or, 7 years ago, in fact. I have one half-painted one that says 2000.

I painted them up and added the recipient's initial and the year. (I'm all about the initials because most of these are gifts for kids and some are siblings. Which ornament belongs to which kid is not a fight I want to leave the parents with.)




I actually cheated a bit on this one. The round ornaments had one side painted ages ago. I never got around to painting the flip side.



There was no hope of my matching the paint colors, but I tried to stay in the same neighborhood.

Then I had a little more fun with Sculpey.



We've been needing one of those Clean/Dirty magnets since we moved into our apartment (which comes with a dishwasher). We've been making do with words from my Magnetic Poetry kit, but it's not quite the thing. I made 3 squares, baked and painted. One is for us, and 2 are gifts. I had a bare magnet on the fridge, cut it into quarters and attached to the sculpey with double sided mounting tape. I only did the one for us at first, in case the tape wasn't strong enough and it fell apart under use. So far, so good and I attached the magnets to the other 2. I'm looking forward to making more magnets this way.

I'm glad I did this, even though I didn't use up as much stuff as I'd hoped. I'll remember to dive into my non-knitting stash when I'm thinking of gifts in the future.

The Holidays Come Late

Last year, for the holidays I set myself a Craft Challenge that was definitely Frugal Crafting.

Here's the first post about it. Tune in tomorrow for the second. They're all crafts that can be done comfortably in the hot weather (unlike knitting a gigantic afghan wedding gift which I am totally going to finish before their first anniversary next June).

What with that whole wedding thing, I promised myself no knitted gifts this year. But now that I've been laid off, at least some handmade gifts are going to be necessary. Preferably things that won't take as long as knitting.

Oh look, 6 whole drawers of craft supplies. Oh, yeah, plus that box in the closet. Hmmm, and there's that box of yarn in the living room because there's no room for it in the closet or my craft drawers*.

Hey, what if I use up some of these craft supplies to make presents? By using up this stuff, I'll have more room for yarn and I'll have more space for my stuff because I'll have less stuff. It'll be just like cleaning, but with paints and glue.

So that's the challenge I'm threw at myself this month (well, on top of that whole job hunting thing). How much will I be able to use up? Will I actually manage to empty a drawer? Let's find out!

First up, I took a page from Practical Polly's book and made some pretty notebooks.

(Instructions in the linked post above.)

I used up some wrapping paper I had in the closet, and some white printer paper that had been victimized in the incident known as That Time I Knocked Over My Coffee Onto All of My Good Printer Paper. Only the edges of some of the sheets were stained, so I held onto them for scrap. I also used up some purple printer paper that I've had lying around.

Instead of sewing like Polly, I just cut triangular notches in the spine and tied the notebooks together with a double-knot/double-bow combo. I was totally being artistic with the notches. It has nothing to do with The Great Where The Fucking Hell Has My Hole Puncher Gotten Off To Mystery. Nothing at all.

*I just realized that knitting my yarn into sweaters is really just a way of moving the yarn from one closet (craft closet) to another (clothes closet). Duuuude. Like, Duuuuude.