recycling yarn

A visit to blogland sparked my interest in recycling yarn from sweaters. I live in a place where 70 degrees is considered COLD - you don't see people wearing wool too often. So I didn't put much effort into finding old wool sweaters.
However, on a recent stop at a thrift store, two cotton sweaters that caught my eye. The seams were promising. And, yes, I realize that the stripes means lots of joins, but hey, we all gotta start somewhere right. So for a few dollars I have my next project. I decided to start with the white sweater, since it was one color and had short sleeves.  Got the sleeves off with very little trouble, even was able to find an end without much fuss. But wait, it's cotton... stranded cotton...4 ply... this is not looking good. Since I was ripping out a short sleeve I decided to keep going and see what happens. Well, the unraveling went extremely quickly, but then had a problem getting the yarn into a hank so I could wash it and get the ripples to relax. The strands kept splitting.


Nope, stop right there, I'm not spending hours unraveling this for a cotton, that I may or may not be able to use. So project terminated. Both sweaters dumped in a bucket to be washed. I think, I'll just cut panels out and make some pillow coverings... I better use, I think. Well, that will be a project for another day.