Seriously?!

I know I live in Minnesota....specifically really far northern Minnesota. That's not good enough reason to be getting snow flurries on the 16th of May! I think this is the latest I've ever personally seen snow in the air. But then, I'm not originally from northern MN. I spent most of my life central and southern. But seriously...May and snow? NOT COOL!

Anyway....today there was a community rummage sale....I found some old worsted weight wool yarn 4 or 5 skeins for $2 and some Bernat Softee Baby yarn along with other stuff for another $2. So I was thrilled with that. Love finding yarn for cheap!

Also bought a cool book on doing miniatures. Not in knitting, but still. I'm fascinated by miniature stuff.

Recycling Sweaters

I went to the other thrift store today to see if I could find any unravelable sweaters (is that a word? unravelable?)....and I found three! So yay for that...it means that more of my stuffed critters can be repurposed yarn from sweaters. This website has the info that I used to figure out how to do this, and which sweaters are actually worth attempting it on. Its great...it cost me $1 per sweater....so for $3 I have loads and loads of yarn either for stuffed animals (with the unknittable scraps being great for stuffing) or for whatever other things I can think of. yay!

I love thrift stores!

You can almost always find great stuff at thrift stores, at least if you have time and patience. Sometimes you find nothing, but other times you just hit it big. For all that my town is small and fairly remote, we have two fairly good thrift stores. The smaller of the two, I mostly check in once in a while to see if there is any yarn. Twice now I've gotten some pretty decent hauls. This last time (yesterday) I got some stuff by Cascade Yarns, three skeins DK weight for $3 (and their price tags originally were $4.95 a piece!) and three small mystery remnant balls that will work great either for my repurposed stuffed animals or maybe some doll clothes.

I just get to feel great when I rescue things from thrift stores and garage sales...take them from non-use and make them into something (hopefully) cool and loved.

The other, bigger thrift store, they have a $3 bag day every Friday (whatever you can fit in a paper bag for $3....dang good deal, let me tell you) And it is where I get fabric remnants to be made into reusable gift bags and the like. I also can dig in the boxes in the back (things to be thrown out) and take whatever I want for free. Some of it is in perfect or near perfect condition! Its just that they are so overloaded with stuff they can't sell it all (who buys regular cotton tshirts at thrift stores? we all have too many already!) and we're not in a location where its viable to ship extra stuff to 3rd world countries or whatever.

I get tshirts for my rugs and purses, tank tops for bags, sometimes more fabric bag there....occasionally some ribbons or lacy stuff to add to my bags. Its just really fun seeing what I can find in 20-30 minutes of digging around. I've walked out with multiple large bags before.

Oh yeah...then there is the fun of hunting for sweaters that I can unravel for yarn (only ones with the right seams work)--cause even if I pay full price for the sweater (I think its $1, maybe $2) that's still a great deal for the yarn. Sure, I've got to do some work to get it...but still! Odette Octopus is one of the critters made from a sweater yarn, I also have a hippo and a spider...with lots and lots more yarn to go! I may get sick of the color before I run out of yarn!

Newest Critter

So...I was messing around with some partially made stuffed animals (just the body with legs). I had two of them and was being goofy. I randomly stuck some eyes on it and thought, hey...add some arms and it would be a little alien critter or something.



Haven't done that, but Nathan (my boyfriend) suggested doing an octopus instead...so, here she is...Odette Octopus (made with yarn from an unravelled sweater)