Thrifty Pensioner Knits Garments From Recycled Sweaters
Retired business man EJ Jones calls himself the man who knits. From Columbus, Ohio, he used to be a wine and beer merchant who traveled internationally.
On a trip to the Aran Islands on the west coast of Ireland, he discovered the Aran sweater which he subsequently fell in love with. However, unlike most, he was not content just to wear one – he also wanted to make one.
Knitting soon became his passion and now that he is retired, Jones spends about 4 to 5 hours a day knitting.
“It gives me a reason to get out of bed in the morning,” he says.
He only knits with natural fiber such as cashmere, camel hair and, his favorite, wool. However being retired and on an limited income, he finds yarn from the wool shop too expensive.
His thrifty solution is to go to the Salvation Army’s store and buy sweaters that he can take apart. He then up-cycles the yarn into new items such as hats.
Watch this inspiring video showing how EJ goes about recycling sweaters and repurposing the yarn!
I ran right out and found a cashmere sweater at Goodwill to deconstruct it. OMG it is really hard to do! What is the secret to getting decent lengths of yarn?
I’ve not deconstructed, but I have knit sweaters… watching this piece today as part of the 100th episode I see that he used a seam ripper to get rid of the side seams. When I knit, I tend to not use seams up the sides… I would knit in the round, right? But lots of the designer cashmere sweaters are made up of panels that are then stitched together. SO you’ve got to figure out first where the panels are stitched together, remove THAT stitching without harming the surrounding yarn strands, and then find the end of the yarn. If you’ve got a true end of a straight knit stitch, it’s disconcertingly easy to pull it all out (disconcertingly, for someone who had to knit it all together in the first place, at least). But I don’t know if there are some snags when you hit a twist of a cable… I know I’ve never just pulled out a whole sweater through the cables, so I’m not sure… The one he demonstrated on TV was a straight knit back, no purls, no special stitches… no twisted cables. And you’d want to make sure you found a well-taken-care-of sweater at Goodwill… not one that has been stretched or washed in water & shrunk (felted together even). Anyways, it seems the key to his luck is to find the right large piece that has a single yarn through it (notice he did NOT even try to use the yarns from the argyle front of that sweater he deconstructed), and then carefully remove the outside stitches before unravelling. Maybe that will help you?
Got to get to the good Will or send my daughter
Is it possible to donate an amount to his account so that he can choose some new yarn?
What a great story. Thanks for sharing this.
He sells homes, nice homes. He could buy new yarn. Still nothing wrong with reusing the yarn if a person wants too. Taking a sweater apart, in the round it seems it would be ok to undo a sweater but one that is in panels I would think there would be a whole lot of ends, Do you tie the ends and have a lot of knots? Yard that has been washed or to many times at a dry cleaner might not be the best yarn anymore.
The process he is doing is called frogging! If you are looking for sweaters to do this on make sure that the seams are just a straight seam and not a surged seams. Surged seams are what cause you to have short pieces of yarn.
Harvest .Time….It doesn’t matter what he did for a job which above it says that (Retired businessman he used to be a wine and beer merchant who traveled internationally). When you are retired and on a limited income recycling is a great thing to do.
I have been doing this for 35 years. It is six times the pleasure and 1/6 the price of new yarn. First the shopping for sweaters to use, then pleasant evenings watching tv and ripping the sweater, winding on the yarn winder from a ball into center pull yarn cakes, shopping for the right pattern, knitting the garment and finally … donating the leftover yarn. It gives me a great sense of accomplishment and pride. I usually gift my knitting and that is a pleasure too.
Unfortunately as an asthmatic I have had to stop doing this!