Repurposing Wool Fibers

Despite my interest in frugality, I'm relatively new to thrift stores.  Generally I don't enjoy shopping, but there are a couple of Goodwill stores on routes I travel regularly, so I've been stopping in there and browsing lately.  Naturally, there are some amazing deals to be had.  Probably one of the most surprising to me have been the 100% wool sweaters that sell for as little as $2, when they're on markdown.  It simply defies logic that these pure woolen items, some of them brought all the way from Scotland or Australia, end up being given away for a song. Of course, the vast majority of sweaters at the Goodwill are made from synthetic yarns.  But that only makes it a little more of a treasure hunt to seek out the wool.

I'm an occasional, largely seasonal, and not very gifted knitter.  One reason I haven't done more knitting is the incredible expense of the yarn.  It's always much, much cheaper to buy a sweater than to buy the yarn to make one yourself, even if you're paying the full retail price for the sweater.  But those occasional thrift store finds change that equation.   When woolen sweaters sell for so much less than the cost of the constituent materials, I've met my price point.  Mind you, it's not every sweater that can be taken apart by hand, so it pays to know what I'm looking for.  I learned what I needed to from this link. 

Taking apart a knitted item to recycle the yarn is a somewhat tedious task, well suited to wintertime, endless cups of tea, a BBC radio stream, and the company of a playful cat, brisking about the life.  It's amazing how much yarn comes out of a small sweater.  I cut a few cardboard pieces to wind the yarn around as I unravel the sweater.  Binding it in this way helps to stretch out some of the bends the yarn assumed when it was first knitted.  There are steps you can take to further relax the kinks in previously used yarn.  But they take time and effort, and my creations aren't so magnificent that I worry about minor issues such as slightly pre-kinked yarn.

In principle, you could take apart a knitted item made from any sort of fiber.  For my time and money, only wool or other animal fibers would make it worth my while.  I did scoop up an alpaca sweater from the thrift store, and it's waiting to be taken apart.  It's white but slightly stained.  I may decide to dye the yarn if I can't get the stain out. The beauty of acquiring these materials so cheaply is that it gives me free rein to experiment with them and learn from mistakes if I must.

I've knitted one pair of my chunky fingerless gloves, and am currently working on a second pair, both to be donated to the fundraising auction at the PASA conference, which is only days away.  These gloves are knitted with double strands of yarn, which makes them extra warm.  For both pairs of gloves I'm using the repurposed yarn as one strand.  It's satisfying to salvage and re-use this material.  The color of the sweater is such that I wouldn't choose to wear it myself, but in a double stranded item, I think it turns out quite pretty.

I'm off to the conference on Wednesday, presenting on Thursday, and enjoying myself thoroughly on Friday and Saturday.  After I'm home, I'll give my usual summary of the conference highlights, and with a little luck, relocate my writing mojo, which has been scarce of late.  Hope winter is treating you all well.

Bialys!

I woke up yesterday knowing that it was going to be a cold day. I like a good snowstorm when I've got everything I need for a week or more and have nowhere I need to go. There's an unearthly beauty in falling snow that layers itself thickly over branches and fence lines. But the 20 F weather with the 25 mph wind sure makes it forbidding outside.

So I decided to do just a little baking to take the chill off the house. Since I hadn't mixed up any dough on Sunday, it was going to have to be something pretty fast. That's when I stumbled on to the bialy recipe in Artisan Baking, by Maggie Glezer. Don't know what a bialy is? Not too surprising since they're almost unknown outside of New York City. Bialys are very small breads, sort of like a bagel. But instead of having a hole in the center, they have an indentation, and they're not boiled before baking. The dimple in the bread is filled, usually, with browned onions, but occasionally with garlic or poppy seeds. Another Jewish contribution to the world of baked goods. Like bagels, bialys can be sliced and topped with various things, simple butter, or lox and cream cheese apparently being the most popular choices.

I couldn't swear that I'd never eaten a bialy before I made my first batch, but if I ever had, the experience didn't leave much of an impression on me. Fortunately, a bialy straight out of the oven turned out to be a most memorable and enjoyable experience.

I won't copy out the recipe here, because it's long and there would be copyright issues. But I will tell you that it was a real pleasure to work with the dough, which gets worked and warmed several times in a food processor between hand kneadings. The warm dough felt wonderful on my hands in a chilly kitchen. The warmth also gave the yeast a nice head start that would otherwise be hard to provide in my coolish winter home.

I tried two different ways of shaping the bialys and found that the dough really did need to be pulled out very wide and almost flat. The ones I stretched out less than that almost completely lost their dimples and puffed up like balls, despite the fact that they are shaped immediately before going into the oven. I thought handling them too aggressively would deflate the dough and make them flat. Now I know. I enjoyed them all, but the widest ones were best.

The onion filing is usually just ground up and lightly baked onions. Of course, glutton that I am, I went overboard. I had some schmaltz that needed using up. So after grinding up the onions, I cooked them in the rendered chicken fat, and used that for my bialy topping, along with kosher salt. It's not authentic, I know, but I make no apologies. The recipe also warned me to go light on the topping. This I most deliberately ignored. And I'm glad I did.

I ate two bialys right away, the first one piping hot out of the oven. The recipe said they don't keep very well, so I didn't hold back, much. I can see, today, that the cookbook is correct; they really are best fresh from the oven. It's no wonder then that whatever bialy I might or might not have eaten in the past was so underwhelming. I probably got one several hours old. My own bialys were good enough that I would have happily devoured half a dozen. But then I would have had to lay on the floor and moan for a while. I can see that these quick to prepare little gems may become a habit when the weather's chilly and there's schmaltz in the house.

If you enjoy baking and are looking for easy breads to make on relatively short notice, have a look at a good bialy recipe. I mixed the dough at 9 am and enjoyed my first bialy around 2 pm. You don't have to use the schmaltz, as I did, but it sure made for an incredibly tasty, cheap indulgence.

You've all been mighty quiet lately. Did I drive you away with the meat rabbit post, or was it my unannounced absence last week?

Fingerless Gloves - Easy Knitting Project

It's getting cold again. We had a hard frost overnight. The hens' water was limned with ice when I went out this morning to feed them. Our heater is finally kicking on, even with the thermostat set at just 64. I rummaged through the coat closet to find my beloved fingerless gloves. Then I realized that I hadn't ever posted about these marvelous homemade treasures.

For those who want to be frugal and have to sit still to work or study, winter can be a hard time of year. It's no problem keeping warm when it's time for housework or cooking. But sit down for an hour or more, and the circulation slows and the chill creeps in. It goes without saying that layering up will help, and I even wear a comfy hat inside. But I found that my hands get cold as I write, type, or hold a book. And when my hands get cold and stay cold, I'm unhappy. Enter a simple knitting project!

A few winters back, I decided to turn my very rudimentary knitting skills to the task of keeping my hands warm. I found a cute knitting pattern for fingerless gloves in Interweave Knits magazine, but it required knitting in the round with double-pointed needles, which I'd never tried before. (I'd previously only knitted flat things, like scarves, baby blankets and afghans.) I wasn't sure that I could do it, but I knew that the local yarn shop would help me out in a pinch. So I invested in the double pointed needles, bought some yarn, and set to it. As with many knitting techniques, it took only a little bit of trial and error to figure out. I soon found that knitting with double-pointed needles wasn't as daunting as it had seemed. I was able to produce one fingerless glove in a long evening. And the pattern was simple enough that even I could manage to make two roughly symmetrical gloves.

After making a pair for myself, I felt confident enough to make a larger pair for my husband, who works from home most of the time and who had also complained of cold hands. I decided that his would be more snug than the pair I made for myself, which were quite loose and baggy when made according to the pattern as given. Some "fingerless" gloves actually have short, truncated fingers on them. These are completely fingerless gloves, which don't interfere with typing at all, but still keep the hands warm. For those of you who knit, here's what I did:

The pattern is worked in p1, k1 rib stitch, 24 stitches per row, evenly divided on three dp needles. For my husband's gloves I started with smaller gauge needles (US size 5, I believe) and gradually increased the size every few rows until I was working with size 11 needles. That made a tapered tube so that the part of the glove that covers the wrist is narrow, and the part that covers the hand relatively wide, especially around the thumb. The length of the gloves is up to personal preference. It's easy to just eyeball the length as you're working them. When the glove is the right size to fit on the wrist/lower arm above the base of the thumb, bind off three stitches in the middle of whatever row you're at. This will form the hole for the thumb. On the next row, cast on three extra stitches at that point and continue working for a few more rows, until there's enough material to cover the knuckles and at least part of the first bone of the fingers. If in doubt, add an extra row or two after the thumb hole. Better a little long than too short. Bind off when you have the length you want, then make a matching glove following the exact same pattern. Either glove can be worn on either hand.

Here's a picture of my handmade fingerless gloves on my husband's hands. You can see how snug they are around his lower arm and wrist.


He really likes them, even though he resisted the idea at first. Knitters with good eyesight may be able to tell that I worked both pairs of gloves with two yarns knitted together. I let him pick out the colors from among my yarns. He chose one navy blue woolen yarn and a green acrylic yarn to go with it. It took less than 1 skein of each yarn to make the pairs of gloves.

If you're trying to keep warm on a tight budget, these gloves can be cheaply made with acrylic yarn. They're also nice gifts for friends or family for the upcoming winter holiday. If you're an experienced knitter, you'll be able to knock out one glove in an evening. Less experienced knitters may take a few days to complete this project.