Recycled Yarn Tutorial

This is the sweater we will be unraveling. Turn your sweater inside-out, grab a pair of sharp scissors and let's get started!	There are good seams and bad seams. This is an example of a good seam. You can cut a good seam and unravel a super-long strand of yarn that you can wind into a huge skein. If you cut a bad seam, you will get short equal-length pieces of yarn which I call yarnlets. Don’t bother unraveling a sweater made entirely of bad seams, unless you love hundreds of knots in your project.	If you pull the good seam apart you will see a thread which you will be cutting to separate the pieces of the sweater for unraveling. See the little thread? This thread is your best friend. It will lead you to good things in life. Love the little thread.	This is what a bad seam looks like. This means that the sweater was machine made. Someone basically knit a huge piece of fabric, and then cut it into pieces and seamed it together before the knitting could unravel. These seams are “surged” and cannot be unraveled.
Starting at the bottom of the sweater, cut the little thread. Newbie unravelers will want to cut the thread one bit at a time, which is fine. They will usually have a longer piece of yarn, because they are cautious not to accidentally snip the yarn itself. I cut without a care in the world. Be free. Show the sweater who is boss!	Here's a close-up picture of the little thread I'm cutting to separate the pieces of the sweater. Sometimes you can pull on this little thread, and it will come freely apart from the sweater. Sometimes you have to un-loop the little thread around and around the seam. Different sweaters are made different ways, and therefore are unraveled in different ways. Basically, you are removing the seams so you can unravel the individual pieces of the sweater.	I've cut the seam from the bottom of the sweater to the end of the sleeve.	I’ve removed the sleeve off by cutting the seams around the shoulder. We are going to unravel this sleeve first. You can continue cutting all the seams until your sweater is in several pieces, or you can unravel each piece as it is removed from the body of the sweater.
At the top of the sleeve are little loops! This will be familiar to any knitter. Loops are on your needles when you're knitting (and off when you take the needle out).	Cut in between each loop. Usually there is a braid of thread that has been sewn over the loops to keep them from unraveling. Be careful not to cut the loops themselves.	Look at the end of either side of the loops for a small knot. Untie this knot and the sleeve will begin to unravel!	The entire sleeve is unraveled. This is what I call “Yarn Ramen”.
FLASH FORWARD: See the pile of yarn ramen in this photo? Pretend that never happened. Your yarn WILL become a tangled mess if you unravel it this way. Instead of unraveling the loose yarn into a pile – ROLL IT INTO A BALL AS YOU UNRAVEL. This will save you HOURS upon HOURS of untangling.	When you unravel a sweater that is made of many colors, you will usually find a knot where the two colors meet. You can either untie the knot, which results in several small balls of different colored yarns; or you can roll the yarn into one big ball, and have different stripes of colors appear as you knit.	Now, to review: starting at the base of the sweater on the other side I begin to cut again...	After cutting the shoulder seam, the second sleeve is free from the sweater.
Cut the braid between the loops. Find and un-knot the end. Unravel the second sleeve.	Here is the collar and shoulder seams of the sweater, still waiting to be unraveled.	But what do we have here? BAD SEAMS!!! Oh no!!! What will I do!?	On the collar I find a good seam! I separate it to find the little thread and begin cutting...
As I cut the good seam on the collar, the little thread reveals itself to me around the neck of the sweater. Oh how I love thee, little thread!!!	On a whim I pull the little thread. After removing the tag it comes away freely...	And now the collar is separated from the body of the sweater! Find the end (at the base of the collar, where it has begun to unravel already) and...	The collar is unraveled!
Now all we have left are the front and back of the sweater.	But what do we do about the bad seam on each shoulder?	After spending 15 minutes or so trying to figure out if there was a way to salvage the yarn attached to the bad seams, I grew annoyed and took drastic action and just cut the seam off on both sides.	I then unraveled the bad seam off, and got several short yarnlets which you can see in the corner. You will always have yarnlets when you cut bad seams.
I easily unraveled to the body of the sweater, which was in the shape of a rectangle after all the yarnlets were removed.	And remember…your finished recycled yarn sweater should be in several spheres instead of a pile of yarn ramen. Rolling your yarn into a ball as you unravel will save you hours of untangling time.	Here is the skein-measuring thing my husband made for me. It's a long piece of wood with two nails exactly 3 feet apart.	I wrapped the yarn around my cool skein-measuring thing until I reached an end. I tied pieces of yarn where the nails are, and washed the yarn (if necessary).