Knitted Cardigans from Reclaimed Wool

I live in a climate where I always need some kind of sweater at some point in the day and  I recently finished knitting two new additions to my sweater wardrobe.  They both started its life as a 100% wool bulky pullover that  someone hand knit for the South American tourist trade.

When I saw it at the thrift store I knew it was too heavy for anyone to wear around here as a cabled pullover, so I brought it home, unraveled it, and gave it a koolaid dye bath. I wrote a tutorial for koolaid dying in an earlier post.  My favorite tutorial for unraveling sweaters for their yarn is here.

The yarn was a nice fluffy single, with no twist.

This reclaimed sweater yielded what seems to be an infinite supply of yarn.  I didn't dye it all, but most of the yarn I dyed blue went into knitting Abbi: Shawl Collar Cardigan, a pattern I bought on Ravelry.

This has turned out to be the most comfortable sweater and it has a slightly retro 60s look to it.

Some of the undyed yarn went into my Mitered Threesome cardigan, which you can see here drying on the floor after some mild blocking. 

I fell in love with this pattern when it was featured on the cover of Love of Knitting magazine in Spring 2011.  The pattern calls for multiple yarns in different weights, and so I cleared some small amounts of wool from my stash that were too small to be knit into a sweater by themselves.

Of course there's STILL more of the bulky reclaimed wool.  We'll see were its reincarnation takes it next.