Falling Apart.

Many moons ago when nothing pleased me more than an oversized sweater that I could layer over multiple t-shirts, I found this sweater at J. Crew in the clearance bin at a ridiculously marked off price. I think it may even be a men's sweater. It was as they say, A Steal.

That being said, I can't remember the last time I wore it.

I re-discovered it on a recent visit to the 'rents this past weekend and decided this was the perfect sweater to try that whole conscientious recycle-your-old-sweaters bit. Using this tutorial, I looked at my seams and determined that this sweater did indeed have "good seams." Taking a deep breath, I took the plunge and began to snip ...



Well, let's just say that it was certainly a learning experience. I decided to start first with the sleeve as the tutorial suggests, and go through it piece by piece. My sleeve was slightly different than the one used in the tute in that it apparently was not knit in the round. I had to cut yet another seam down the length of the sleeve. Having been somewhat carefree while cutting my seam (but the tute said I could!), this caused a few problems. As I was unraveling my yarn lengths, many did not exceed more than a couple rows. Three hours later, this is what I had:



The other problem was that the plies just fell apart and got caught up within each other, especially in the area of the former seam stitches (hence, the reason it took three f-ing hours to unravel a single sleeve).

Many mini-yarn globules later, it occurred to me to check the tag on this sweater. 100% cotton. No wonder the plies were just falling apart. Or, at least I think that's the reason. I haven't the heart to google it only to find out that I'm just a moron and can't unravel a sweater, so I am perfectly happy living with this hypothesis, false as it may be.



I'm trying to figure out what to do with the rest of the damn sweater. I'm not so sure that unraveling it will yield much reusable yarn.

I am however somewhat intrigued by the fact that when balled, the yarn lies in kind of a ribbon-like fashion.



Maybe when I'm feeling more motivated I'll swatch it up and see what kind of a stitch I can get out of it.

In other news, I am without the internet at home for the time being, and am sneaking time while at work (shh!). The cable people haven't yet figured out if it's a problem with my modem, or if it's part of a recent neighborhood outage. Hmm, maybe I'll actually get some knitting done instead of reading about other people knitting...