New Bad Habits

I'm sure it really began way before 2011. My oldest daughter took her first crochet class in 2008, she is a natural and picked it up easily. Fast forward to the spring of 2011, J decided she wanted to make Amigurimi creatures. Introduce Janet, the crochet teacher at out LYS (Local Yarn Shop), she is amazing, we love her. Since they did not have a children's class, I purchased private lessons, I decided to hang around and refine my limited skills.

J started to make hats, she is wearing one in the photo, and she wanted to start her own crafting company, my lord, the apple does not fall far. I wanted to help her, but I also thought, making crafts to sell is really hard. I have been running both a crafting company and a retail fabric company for the past five+ years, no part of it is easy, generally fun but not easy.

We found a cool organization, Hats for Hunger, run by a home schooled student that sold hats and uses the proceeds to purchase animals through Heifers International. J thought this was fabulous, so out to buy yarn at our LYS. After spending $80 for wool yarn to make, maybe, three hats, I thought I might feel better about just writing this young man a check.  J was fairly gung ho to start off with BUT before we could mail them, the organization decided they were wrapping it up and did not need any new hats.

OUR LYSs

Lovin Knit

Whole Nine Yarns

AND SO IT BEGAN.... Now I could crochet (and even knit), after that first trip to the LYS my thrifty conscience kicked in and said "This is extremely expensive, there must be a way that you can find yarn for less, nice fibers, not yucky acrylic ones." By now not only was I crocheting, both #1 & #2 child were, that is a lot of folks to buy supplies for.

I started looking online and I found this website called Ravelry. The slope became very slippery at that point. In this wonderful site, I found a group called UnRavelers. What they do is go to thrift stores, a habit I already have, and purchase sweaters with certain criteria to dismantle. I, of course, had a few sweaters lying around the house that were not going to work for my Sneaters. These sweaters were too bulky or they were heavily cabled, I just put them to the side, thinking I would figure out something to do with them.

Here it comes. Let's take them apart! We now have so much yarn. We would have to crochet everyday, all day long to go through my yarn stash. Since I can't just do it kind of, I have to do it all the way, not only am I taking sweaters apart that have yarn that I want to use as is (the sweater is the right weight & right color), I am also out there finding sweaters that have thin, fine yarn and spinning them into thicker yarn, making them into a DK or worsted weight yarn. It does not matter what color the sweater is, cause I am also dying the yarn with Acid Dyes from Pro Chem.

Yes, in 2012, we will have yarn and maybe even some finished crochet items in the booth. There will also be a lot of blog posts about my new bad habit!