Unraveling a Sweater for the Yarn: 6 steps

Unravel sweaters for the yarn

Hanks of yarn unraveled from the mixed-fiber silk sweater.

When I was in college, an older woman in my neighborhood confided conspiratorially to me as I admired her knitting, “do you know where I get my yarn?” I thought she was going to tell me about a hidden yarn shop in a nearby town. I wasn’t prepared for her revelation to change my crafting world “I unravel it from sweaters I buy at thrift stores.” A sweater’s worth of yarn for $3.99?! Later that day, I bought several sweaters at Value Village, took them home, and began to unravel them. I remember the long snakes of kinky blue yarn all over the living room of my apartment! What a mess! But unraveling was fun and I did feel good about recycling the yarn and getting some great blue wool.

That was in 1996. The internet did not contain a lot of tutorials advising what to look for in a sweater, where to begin, how to deal with the kinky yarn recovered from the sweater, or that unraveling sweaters could turn into a yarn obsession itself. I had to learn many lessons along the way. Today I will share a few of those lessons as tips in six steps for unraveling sweaters. I will work though unraveling this fine-gauge mixed-fiber silk/nylon sweater.

Silk sweater I am going to unravel for the yarnI love working with silk. It is strong, fine, smooth, and works up into something drapey and almost luminous. And it takes dye like a dream! This particular sweater is 75% silk and 25% nylon. I’m going to save the silk and get rid of the nylon. Because those two fibers have different textures and behaviors, you can separate them easily, especially once you get started. Separating the different threads does add an extra step to the process and it would be nice if we didn’t have to do that, but you find what you find at thrift stores. This creamy silk was crying out to become a scarf. I couldn’t just leave it there.

1. Choose the sweaters carefully

My neighbor did tell me to look for the right kind of seams. Thankfully, I did not make the mistake of unraveling a sweater into hundreds of one-row lengths of yarn. You’ll want to check the seams of the sweater before you fall in love with the yarn it could yield and certainly before you start taking it apart.

Seams on a sweater that you can unravel for yarn.             Seams on a sweater that you can unravel for the yarn.

The seams above are the kind of seam you want. Each edge of the sewn together fabric lives peacefully on its own without being serged to the other piece’s edge. See how when you pull back one side of the seam you can see a little crochet chain nestled in there? That crochet chain holds those two pieces of the sweater together. If you undo that crochet chain, those two pieces of sweater will come apart. On fuzzier sweaters, this takes a bit more hunting, but it is possible to locate it. Just make sure you avoid serged seams:

Serged seams on a sweater. Do not try to unravel.            Serged seams: avoid when choosing sweaters to unravel.

This is the kind of seam you DO NOT want. This indicates that each edge of the fabric was cut and then serged together. If you were to unravel it, each row would be a separate strand of yarn. That would be messy and a waste of your time. Put sweaters with these kinds of seams back on the rack.

Even before you get to checking seams, you will want to pick a sweater made of a yarn you like. I soon learned that the best use of unraveling time and effort was to find fibers that I wouldn’t be able to afford if I purchased the yarn at a store. So I kept my eyes out for cashmere, wool, angora, merino wool, and silk. The bigger the sweater, the better. (Cables are great because they take more yarn to make.) Soon, I became pretty adept at working through sweater racks by feel, “soft!…wait, too crunchy, that’s acrylic, not cashmere.”

Find the yarn you like, look at the fiber content to make sure it is what you want, check to see if there are any huge holes or stains that will make it difficult to get the amount of yarn you want, and CHECK THE SEAMS!

2. Prepare the sweater

I wash the sweaters before I begin to unravel them. For this silk, that meant tossing it into the machine on gentle and washing it in cold water with some Woolite. For wool, cashmere, and angora sweaters, do the same thing. Hang everything to dry. I have never had a problem with a sweater felting if I wash it this way.

A lot of sweaters have landed at thrift stores because they have stains or small (or large) holes in them. These small (or large) holes could be due to moths. It is good practice to place wool and cashmere sweaters that you buy from thrift stores into ziplock bags and into the freezer for 72 hours to kill any moth larvae that might be lingering in the fabric (2 gallon ziplock bags work well for this). One would not want to find that their newly knit or crocheted masterpiece has been eaten by moths that came home from the store in the sweater. Or that those little stowaways also chewed through other wool in the house.

After you wash and hang the sweater to dry and then possibly freeze and hang it up to thaw, you’re ready to start taking the sweater apart.

3. Deconstruct that sweater!

While 1996 had a dearth of online information about unraveling sweaters, today, there are many fabulous tutorials and sets of instructions on recovering yarn from sweaters available online. I especially like Morale Fiber’s tutorial on breaking into a sweater. The details she provides on how to preserve as much yarn as possible and how to undo seams are quite helpful, even if you have been taking sweaters apart for years.

Turn your sweater inside out and find the seams that connect the sleeves to the rest of the sweater. The bulkiest part of the seam probably holds the end of the crochet chain that holds the seam together. Sometimes I find it at the spot where the side seams join the sleeve seams and the ends of the crochet chain crisscross the seams to secure them. Other times you’ll find them at the top of the sleeve at the shoulder seams or at another spot along the seam.

Seams to deconstruct when unraveling a sweater             Crochet tail on a seam, undo to begin unraveling.

Sometimes I locate the end of the chain and unravel it from there, other times I give up and use a seam ripper to cut a single stitch of the chain at some other point along the seam. You’ll want to be careful to cut the seam stitch, rather than the fabric of the sweater. Once you get the chain to unravel a little, pull. There is very little else that is as satisfying as unraveling the chain apart for the length of the seam. The stitches pull out and the two pieces of sweater fall away from each other. It’s glorious. (Like pulling that large film of dried glue off your finger or getting a label to come away from a jar in one piece.)

Deconstructed sweater ready for unraveling

Do this for all the seams of the sweater. Now you have all the parts of the sweater as flat pieces of fabric.

This picture shows hanks of yarn recovered from one sleeve, then the back of the sweater, the front of the sweater and the other sleeve.

4. Unraveling the sweater

Once you undo the seams of the sweater and have flat pieces of fabric, it’s time to begin unraveling. Morale Fiber’s tutorial explains how to undo the bind off at the top of each piece of the sweater, but I am not exactly patient enough to do that, so I use a mild version of the second approach she discusses. I take tiny scissors and cut the top row off. This does mean losing a few rows of yarn, as it is pretty much impossible to cut only one row of knit fabric with scissors. Then I gently pull and tug at the tiny snippets of yarn until I can unravel one continuous strand. It’s a little messy, but actually quite fun.

This particular sweater is a double knit sweater, which means that the nylon strand and the silk strand are knit together. You can unravel both strands at the same time or unravel one at a time. If you pull too much of one of them, it will stop at the end of the row to wait for the other one to catch up. Unraveling too much of the yarn with both strands together without winding or separating it will likely result in a tangled mess. (Not that I speak from experience or anything…)

To keep them separate, I just wound the silk around a DVD case while keeping the frizzy bit off to the side, unraveling one strand at a time: nylon row, silk row, nylon row, silk row, nylon row, silk row, wind, wind, wind. The frizzy bit (also referred to as fluff or “fuff” by our two year old) sticks to itself quite nicely, so you can kind of ball it up like a used tissue. Play around with it. You’ll find what works best for you.

Unraveling the silk strand and nylon strand from a mixed-fiber sweater             Unraveling the silk and discarding the nylon from a mixed-fiber sweater

5. How to gather the yarn

Honestly, I usually wind the yarn into a ball as I’m unraveling. Because I am going to dye this yarn and because I want to remove the kinks before I wind it into balls, I am winding it around a DVD case to create hanks about the right size for the dye bath.

Unraveling the yarn and wrapping it around a DVD case

After winding a fair amount of yarn around the DVD case, I take a bit of cotton crochet thread and tie it around the hank in 3-4 places and then I slip the hank off the DVD case. When unraveling this sweater, one of the hanks got a little big. It was also a little tight and when I slipped it off, several strands got caught and broke. I would recommend an item that doesn’t have sharp plastic edges. A book would work wonderfully.

I don’t have a niddy-noddy and I needed the hanks to be about the size of a paperback or DVD case, so that is what I chose to use. If you have a niddy-noddy or a favorite method of winding yarn, you should use what works best for you. Niddy-noddies also have the advantage of helping one estimate the yardage of the yarn. I did not do any kind of estimating of yardage as I unraveled this sweater. Next time.

Once you have removed the hank of yarn it will be curly and kinky. It will look like ramen noodles and will probably contract into a much smaller, puffier ball of kinked yarn. You can work with yarn that is kinky, but you get much more predictable results if you remove or loosen the kinks.

6. I have all this kinky yarn. Now what?

After I had a few hanks done, I stuffed them into a glass of water, and let them soak. After 10 minutes or so, I gently squeezed the water out and hung it up to dry on a hanger. Morale Fiber’s suggestion of hanging hangers from the bottom of the hank works wonderfully to pull the kinks out a bit while the yarn dries. I wasn’t ready to dye the yarn at this stage, so I hung it up to de-kink and dry.

Hanks of yarn unraveled from the mixed-fiber silk sweater.

Now you have recycled some great yarn and you can get started creating your new project. Or…

Combining or blending your yarn with other yarns can create some beautiful effects. I once took a thick lavender wool yarn recovered from a sweater and crocheted it with a strand of a soft gray wool blend. The result was heathery and soft, but with more structure than they gray would have had alone.

You can take your newly recovered yarn and dye it! I plan to dye this silk several different colors for the scarf project the yarn was meant for. (Stay tuned to see how dying recycled silk yarn with Kool-Aid goes.) The possibilities are endless!

Final Unraveling Thoughts…

The downside of unraveling for yarn, of course, is that once the yarn is gone, it’s gone. You can’t go back to the store to get more or go to eBay and buy some skeins that someone has kept after the manufacturer discontinued it. But who doesn’t have several items in their stash that they can’t get more of? Maybe you bought a one-of-a-kind skein of hand-dyed wool at an art show or three balls of a merino/silk blend at a yarn store on vacation made by a manufacturer that doesn’t exist anymore. We live with limited yarn supply all the time. We just think of limited projects for that yarn and we move on to the next one.

It’s refreshing to see an abandoned sweater and to be able to give it new life as something else! I will warn you it’s hard to resist those four sweaters that could be perfect for your next project. And for me, because I can’t just find them online later, I have such a hard time cutting myself off. But I remind myself that I started unraveling sweaters 20 years ago and that there are still gorgeous sweaters to unravel every time I go to a thrift store. There will be something there next time if you can’t get all nine this time!

If you have comments, suggestions, or questions, I would love to read them in the comments. What experience do you have with unraveling to recycle the yarn? What kind of yarn makes you want to put the time and effort into unraveling a sweater? Any suggestions for making the process easier or finding great sweaters?

82 thoughts on “Unraveling a Sweater for the Yarn: 6 steps

  1. How do you unkink the yarn? Do you work with knitting machines? I would like the finishes product to look as professional as possible and I am worried that the kinky yarn might make the project look too home made. Also concerned about rhe amount of time it takes to knit by hand. Do u have any suggestions on knitting machines for children’s clothing?

    1. The way I unkink the yarn is to get it wet and hang it up in large loops/hanks and maybe hang a weight from the bottom of the hank to get the kinks to relax a little. A lot of time I’m dyeing the yarn too, which is another opportunity for the yarn to be wet and for kinks to relax out of it. I don’t know anything about knitting machines, but once the yarn has relaxed a little it will work up like any other yarn. Thank you so much for visiting!

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