Crafter Fail

Oh dear, this is embarrassing. I've seen a few blog posts and tutorials about reclaiming wool from garments and it instantly ignited my thrifty, crafty, op-shopper, good-for-the-planet senses and I was desperate to try it. I finally found a jumper with yarn I liked at a local op shop and it seemed to have the good seams I'd read about.

I spent several evenings unravelling the wool and was finally ready to wash it yesterday. I soaked the yarn in wool wash for a while before throwing in the rest of my wool items that needed washing and ran the machine on its wool cycle. Ba-bowwww fail. What an idiot - of course you're not supposed to run it through the machine, it's in such a vulnerable state! It came out quite matted, not felted, but not easy to roll into a ball.

So devastated was I that I couldn't yet admit defeat and spent the next two and a half hours unmatting one of the skeins and rolling the damp wool into a ball. Yes, it took me two and a half hours to get one ball and I have no idea whether it will knit OK. In fact I'm only just learning to knit so even when I do knit it I still won't know if it's bad or if it's just me.

I have four more skeins of matted wool that is now dry and I don't think I can face trying to get any more balls out of it.

I'm not so smug now about paying $1.50 for a full jumper's worth of wool when I've spent so many hours just to get one ball of questionable yarn.