Doodle’s Felted Wool Afghan

I feel kind of bad.  Here I am, third-place winner for Best Blog About Crafting and I haven’t put up a crafting post in an age.  Sorry about that.  But rest assured I’m working hard on two major projects.  They’re just the sort of long-term ones that don’t make for exciting blogging.

Two people who are very dear to me are getting married this summer.  My eldest brother, Krystopf, ties the knot in early July, and my high school best friend, Doodle, gets hitched in mid-June.  I am making both of their wedding presents, and both of them are blankets.

Doodle and her soon-to-be husband, The Cyclist, live in Portland, Oregon, a place with weather very similar to what it is here in St. John’s.  By that I mean, windy and rainy.  So an ideal present would be one that encourages cuddling and coziness, right?  And we know from previous experience that felted wool is the coziest of them all.

When we were in Ottawa over Christmas, the Pie and I scoured the local second-hand stores to acquire as many genuine lambswool, merino, and cashmere sweaters as we could, in a specific range of colours.  Doodle and I agreed on red, white, blue, and black, as sort of a combination of Canadian and American colours (and black goes with everything).  I wanted to do something a bit different with this blanket, and have the colours sort of blend into each other, rather than have a pattern of alternating coloured squares.  So it’s going to be a bit trickier than normal.

Here you can see our initial haul (and Gren).  This is the colour scheme I am going with.  You can see that the main colours are represented at the corners, and then they blend through the other colours in the middle.  Like a square colour wheel.

Now, if you feel like undertaking a similar project, I just want to give you a heads-up first.  A lot of up-cycling and recycling projects are economical and a good way to save money.  This is not one of them.  A 100% wool or cashmere sweater, even second-hand, will run you between $9 and $14, depending on the quality and size, and for this project, we will be using approximately 25 sweaters.  So you can do the math there.

I felted all the sweaters while at my parents’ house (to take advantage of the fact that they were footing the power bill), and we mailed the sweaters back to ourselves in St. John’s.

Then I dismantled them.  I carefully cut out all the seams, so all the pieces of sweater lay flat.

I’m saving the seams.  I think they would make good toy stuffing material.

Here are all the sweaters, officially laid out in their colour wheel.

The sweater in the middle will serve as my keystone, if you will, and then I’ll use the rest of it to construct some baby toys for some wee ones I get to meet this summer.

Now I have to start cutting out the pieces.  I want to do it more as a puzzle or interlocking oblongs than as simple squares, so I’m going to have to work out some ratios so that all the pieces will fit together nicely.  I will keep you posted.

Hole in the Wall

Normally we have a little rack here where we hang the clothes that are not quite dirty enough to wash but worn enough that we can’t justify putting them back in our drawers.  One week we got a little lazy and overloaded the rack.  And it fell off the wall, taking the screws with it.  Leaving these holes.

It’s strange how such a little thing can alter your whole life.  Because we don’t have the rack at present, the Pie and I are putting our clothes on the backs of chairs in our room.  This means that some of the things we normally keep on the chairs are now in our closet.  Which means that our closet is full, so some things that are normally in the closet are on top of Gren’s crate.  Which means that things that normally go on top of Gren’s crate end up on the floor.  Our room is a certified disaster zone, all because of a stupid $15 clothes rack.  It’s utter chaos.  CHAOS, I tell you.

Gotta fix it to achieve equilibrium.

Patching small holes in gyp-rock or plaster walls is an easy process.

First, take a box cutter or other sharp knife and cut off the bits of plaster that are sticking out from the wall.  Sand the rough edges so everything is flush and level.

Use a filling putty like this Dry-Dex and a flexible putty knife to apply the compound to the holes.  Depending on the depth of your hole, you may need to add a little bit of compound at a time and allow it to dry between applications.

I like this stuff because it goes on pink and you know it’s dry when it turns white.

Lightly sand the dried compound, then wipe the dust off with a soft damp cloth.

Prime it and paint it. We always save the dregs of our paint for just such an occasion.  You can just put it in a yogurt container and it will stay fresh, though you will probably have to stir it well.

When you are putting up stuff that is going to hold other stuff, it helps if you can get your anchoring screws into a joist. If you use a stud-finder this is an easy task (the last time I put this up we didn’t have a stud-finder). And the bonus of this particular model is that it also tells me when I’m about to drill into a power line, saving me from auto-electrocution. Handy.

And now our life is back to normal.  PHEW! Balance restored.

MacGuyver Mittens

As you know, I have been making things out of felted sweaters.

And, if you don’t know, MacGuyver is a television character out of the eighties who could engineer an explosive device using only a paperclip and some pocket lint.  I tend to use MacGuyver as a verb when I’m describing how I successfully completed a task with my own ingenuity and a little bit of elbow grease.

Such was the case with these mittens.  I wanted to do a practice run with sewing together the felted wool, just to see how well it worked and how they felt to wear, before I made them for real.  So I thought, why not use the sleeves?  And the sleeves of this particular sweater had a beautiful row of buttons on them.  It would be a shame to waste them.

So I cut off the sleeves.

Measured them roughly to my hand.

Cut them out.

Flipped them inside out.  You can see that I was able to leave the original seams on the sides. 

Sewed them together.

And tada.

Not the best fit, I grant you, but a decent first effort, considering I didn’t use a pattern.  “Real” ones to follow.

Felting Old Wool Sweaters

As you may know, I’m doing a DIY Christmas this year.

Many of the projects that have come to my attention recently have involved re-using and re-purposing old things you don’t want anymore.

Some of those particular projects involve making items like mittens and hats out of felted wool, which is easy to make and fun.  When natural fibres such as wool are washed and rubbed against each other, the fibres shrink and separate, tangling with other fibres, creating the thick, durable material we know as felt.

Take yourself some old sweaters.  Sweaters that are 100% wool (or merino, angora, cashmere, etc., all the natural animal fibre ones) work the best, but I experimented with two orange sweaters which were 90% wool and 10% nylon.  I picked up most of these at Value Village.Chuck them into your washing machine and wash them in HOT water.  Just make sure you turn all the knobs back when you’re done so the next person doesn’t accidentally shrink all their clothes in the next load!

I managed to produce a large ball of wet sweater babies when I cleaned out the washing machine.Pop them in the dryer when you’re done and when they’re dry they should be felted.  You may have to do this more than once if your sweaters are loosely knit, just to get all the fibres tangled up with each other. If you can cut into the sweater without it unraveling or fraying then you have successfully felted your wool.

You can see how much smaller the sweaters are now.  This used to be a medium-sized adult man’s sweater, and now it would maybe fit a two-year-old.

I removed all the stuck-on sweater babies with a fuzz comb.

Stay tuned for all the fun things I plan to make out of these!