A Spring Scarflette February 22, 2008

A scarflette from recycled materials

As I have mentioned previously I am very in environmental issues. I pay close attention to the resources I consume including food, natural resources, etc. I try to buy second hand items over new ones. This interest is also reflected in my hobbies. It is hard for me to defend contributing to consumer culture by creating goods that use new materials that require a high degree of energy consumption in their production. My solution is to scour local thrifstores to find gently used items that can be repurposed into something different, useful, and beautiful.

One example is a scarflette I recently knitted. First, I found a gently used, high quality, 100% virgin wool sweater at a local thriftstore that contributes 100% of profits to our local homeless shelter, La Puente Home. I found the seam and began unraveling, and unraveling, and unraveling until the sweater was no more. It was now several balls of white wool. I then seperated the yarn into three grouped hanks and dyed each one a different color, blue, green, and purple.

Finally, I reknit the yarn, combining the three strands in a diaganol rib pattern to form the above scarflette. At the end I knit in a button hole and stitched on a large white button. Now this is a creation that I can feel good about and the person who ends up with it can feel good about it too.

Of course an entire sweater did not go into the creation of just one small scarflette. I have a ton of yarn left over and will be using it in several projects to come.