🧶 There's plastic in... yarn? 🧣

Photo by https://unsplash.com/@zimbarus. Various colored yarn in bowl, loose and wound.

Photo by A R on Unsplash.

To share this EarthCare tip with you I must admit to something embarrassing. Until just a few weeks ago I hadn’t realized that nearly all the yarn I've bought over the years is made of plastic. That just wasn’t on my radar.

When a conversation with my son brought it to light, I thought, “Well, I can’t do anything about the past, but I can do something about the yarn I buy from now on.” I decided then and there that I would only purchase donated yarn in the future.

Reusing old yarn, check! But wait—it can be time-consuming and rather tedious to take old yarn and make it usable, especially if it was used to make something else already. That was my situation.

When my daughter was having surgery a couple of years ago, I decided to crochet a blanket to pass the time at the hospital; and to be frank, it’s probably the ugliest blanket that was ever made and truly not donation-worthy. I’m OK with that, but now I was between a rock and a hard place about what to do with all that yarn. It would have been hard on my hands for me to wind it all into a yarn ball. What to do?

Well, it turns out that there’s such a thing called a yarn winder. And that thing is amazing! OK, it is plastic I admit, and I'm not exactly happy about that. Yet it does make it possible for me to reuse old yarn.

The winder is quite durable and it’s very donatable, so if the time comes when I'm not working with yarn anymore, I can feel good about passing it along. It made fast work of changing those yards of yarn into wonderful little balls that I could easily use. And I had so much fun with it! Now I have lots of yarn balls I can use to my heart’s content. Check and double check!

~ Denise

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