Guitar Straps

The first time I saw guitar straps woven on an inkle loom I was inspired. Guitar straps are both useful and a perfect place to showcase your unique style. They also are a fairly simple shape that allows for a lot of variety in pattern and material. I wove the following four guitar straps to try out a few different techniques and yarns, and I love them all! Check them out!

This fiery strap is woven from recycled, hand-painted cotton yarn from an old sweater. I dyed it in stripes while it was still knit up in the sweater pieces, then unraveled it and wove this guitar strap. It is lightweight, flexible and smooth, yet still with the strength that comes from a warp-faced weave that you get on an inkle loom.

A more bulky version is this guitar strap woven from t-yarn. That's right, this one is made from recycled t-shirts! Unlike the other straps, I didn't have to dye the yarn to get these vibrant colors - each color came from a different t-shirt.

This close-up lets you see the texture of the woven t-yarn. It's very sturdy, and has a small amount of stretch that makes it comfortable to wear. Like all the other guitar straps, the end tabs are made from a recycled black leather jacket. Only the hardware is new!

This extra-long strap has two very neat features. It was card-woven, so it is a little thicker than the other cotton straps and features in intricate pattern unique to card-weaving. It also has a variegated yarn that was dyed in a rainbow, which makes the pattern shift from red to orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple as your eye travels down the length of the strap. It is made from recycled wool yarns, and is perfect for taller guitarists who need a longer strap.

Finally, my favorite one is woven from hand-dyed recycled purple and green cotton/acrylic blend yarn along with cassette tape. The cassette tape gives the strap a really fun retro feel, as well as an amazing sparkle. I love the effect and am looking forward to using it again in another guitar strap with a different color combination.

(By the way, when I say this one is my favorite, I mean that I couldn't bear to take it off my guitar after we were done taking photos this morning. It's still hiding in my guitar case, and I'm seriously considering weaving another one to sell, just so I can keep this one. It's so cool.)

All the guitar straps are 2 inches wide, and all except the rainbow-patterned one are the standard size of 30-60 inches. The extra-large size gives you another 6 inches, adjusting from 36-66 inches.

Suggested Retail: $30

Polka-dotted Alien Hat

Sometimes I dye yarn for a specific project, and sometimes I just come up with a fun color combination and the yarn tells me what it wants to be. This alien hat was the latter. I was trying out some new dyes, and the yarn came out brighter and darker than I'd expected. It was a really fun kid-themed colorway that screamed, "Make me into a polka-dotted alien hat!"

The hat is knit out of recycled, hand-painted wool warn. There are short pieces of a bamboo chopstick completely enclosed in knit tubes to stiffen the eyeballs. The eyeballs are ping-pong balls, securely glued into the wool eye sockets.

This hat will fit a toddler or a young child, with a head circumference of approximately 18-19.5 inches. My glass model has an adult head circumference of 22 inches and the hat is too small for it, I just had trouble getting Annie to model a wool hat for more than a minute in the summer heat. But come winter, this hat will make some toddler a very cool (yet very warm) winter hat!

Suggested Retail: $20

Uzbek Napramach Bag

I had a lot of fun making this bag! I had a whole pile of brightly dyed recycled yarns and I wanted to find a project that would allow me to show them off to their best advantage. I adapted this from a design by Vicki Square, published in the very inspiring book Folk Bags. She called it "Napramach" which is an Uzbek word for a type of bag used to store household supplies. I shortened her design a bit to make it work better as a purse, lined it with a deep purple silky fabric, and added a very neat woven strap.

The lining is stiffened with interfacing to give structure to the bag. This makes for a really lovely combination of textures: The tightly-knit wool/silk yarns on the outside, the stiff interior, and the silky lining.

Handles and straps are one of the weakest points of knitting. Frequently knitted handles stretch way out, are too skinny for comfort or else have a less-than-ideal texture. In my quest to overcome these weaknesses, I've been exploring the technique of card-weaving on an inkle loom. My amazing husband just built me a gorgeous inkle loom for this purpose, and this bag handle was my first card-woven strap.

Card weaving allows for beautifully intricate patterns and produces a very sturdy product in the end.

One other note about this bag: It's made entirely from recycled yarns, and four of the colors (blue, green, yellow and pink - the four in the strap) are a wool/silk blend that I dyed with Easter egg dyes! The red and purple are wool yarns dyed with black cherry and grape Kool Aid respectively. All of them are really great semi-solids that worked beautifully into the colorwork patterns of this bag.

Suggested Retail: $40

My home is starting to look like a LYS

As I prepare for the Bloomington Handmade Market (coming up on November 6th, mark your calendars now!) I've been building up my supply of gorgeous recycled yarns. Many of the yarns are already in use as I am knitting into items to sell at my BHM booth, but many others will be available to knitters still in yarn form. The pile is growing so large that my home is starting to look like a LYS, or local yarn shop.

There so many delightful varieties of yarns and colors to pick from! Most are wool or wool blends, but there are also some cotton blends available. The yarns are dyed in all colors of the rainbow, and in every colorway from solids to hand-painted variegated (the majority) to large self-striping patterns. I've used drink mixes, tie-dye, and all natural dyestuffs to achieve the colors. Basically, I've got a huge array of yarn in so many types and it is all very exciting!

My beautiful new yarn swift

For my birthday last week, my amazing husband built me a gorgeous yarn swift. Basically, the purpose of this very cool tool is to wind a big skein of yarn, either hand-spun or recovered from a sweater, so that it will be large and loose and ready for dye. Then, after the skein is dyed, I can put it back on the swift and wind it into a ball without ending up with a massive tangle. Want to see it in action? Check it out!

Re-purposed, upcycled yarn!

A few weeks ago I was came close to despairing at the cost of nice yarn. Like any knitter, I love knitting with quality, animal-fiber yarns but our slim budget doesn't really allow for buying specialty yarns. Then I remembered how, back in January, I had some beautiful results with reused, hand-dyed yarn from a thrift store sweater. Finally, I decided to try to stock my yarn cupboard this fall with more gorgeous upcycled yarn.

First I needed to find the right sweater to unravel. I found this 100% lambswool sweater at the Salvation Army for $2.99. It was perfect for what I needed - unfelted, large and with simple seaming. After picking apart the seams carefully, I unraveled each piece and wound them into long skeins.

The yarn skeins looked a lot like ramen noodles - way crinkley!

Next, I soaked the wool skeins in the sink for half an hour while I mixed up the dyes. For this batch, I just used Kool-Aid (and knock-off store brand powdered drink mixes). They make bright, beautiful color-fast dyes. Kind of scary when you think that kids are drinking that stuff!

Then I poured the dye over the wool skeins in stripes, pressing the dye in by hand to make sure it penetrated all layers. My hands ended up as brightly colored as the yarn!

With one of the skeins I tried an experiment that I saw somewhere else online. I poured blue dye into one half of a casserole dish, and green in the other half. Then I placed the skein in the dish, folded up, and let it soak up the dye without moving it around. This worked fairly well, but it did leave some areas un-dyed. Fortunately the small amounts of white worked well with the sea-colors of the finished yarn. I'm hoping to make some sea-monster items out of this yarn!

After the yarn was thoroughly dyed, I took it out to the back yard to cook in the warmth, sun-tea style. Heat helps the yarn absorb the dye and make it colorfast.

After a couple hours in the sun I brought the yarn indoors, rinsed it thoroughly (although the yarn had absorbed the dye so well that not much rinsed out), and hung it to dry. Do you like my improvised drying rack which doubles as a floor lamp?

To measure the yarn my husband screwed a couple bolts into a board 18" apart. This was a rather tedious way of finding out approximately how many yards were in a ball of yarn, and hopefully I'll be able to come up with a better way later on. Nevertheless, I discovered that with this particular yarn 250 yards = 2.3 oz = 65 grams.

The yarn sure makes a beautiful skein.

Most of the yarn I wound up on my new Lacis Ball-winder - my favorite new tool! It really sped up the process of winding from skeins, plus the balls are very attractive. Although the balls vary in size somewhat (such must be the case when using recycled yarn) I made sure that each ball had at least 250 yards.

And there you have it, an old sweater turned into a beautiful, bright pile of yarn! The only question remaining is - how does it knit? And what about felting?

Well, here is a pair of t-strap booties that I knit with large needles in order to felt them. Kind of misshapen at first...

...but so sophisticated after felting!

These Mary Janes were knitted on small needles, so they are close in size to the felted booties. Another style, same yarn.

The Mary Janes are newborn sized, and the T-strap booties are just a bit bigger at 0-3 months.

Suggested retail: $7/250 yard ball of yarn, and $15 each for a pair of simple booties like these.

Stay tuned for more dye lots and projects with upcycled sweaters. I've got a lot more in the works that I'll be posting as the weather cools down and our thoughts turn to stylish warm accessories!